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 THE LIFE AND WORDS OF CHRIST.
 
 gig tbc ^nmt ^utljor. 
 
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 LONDON: JAMES NISBET & CO.
 
 THE LIFE 
 
 AND 
 
 WORDS OE CHRIST 
 
 BY 
 
 CUNNINGHAM ^IKIE, D.D., LL.D. (Edin.), 
 
 late Vicar of St. Martin-at-Palace, l^'orwich. 
 
 HEW EDITION. 
 
 'Thb life was trk Light of Men." 
 
 - John i. 4. 
 
 ILontion: 
 
 JAMES NISBET & CO. 
 21, BERNERS STREET. 
 
 MDCCCXn.
 
 BDTr,BR & Tanner, 
 The Selwood Pbinting Works, 
 
 I'liOilE, ANB LONDOH.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Intkoductoey 
 
 II. The Holy Land 
 
 III. Palestine at the Time of Curist 
 
 IV. TuE Keign of Heeod 
 
 V. The Jewish Woeld at the Time of Cheist 
 
 VI. The Eabbis at the Time ce Christ, and their 
 
 respecting the Messiah 
 
 VII. Birth of John the Baptist 
 
 VIII. The Announcement to Mary 
 
 IX. The Birth of Christ .... 
 
 X. At Bethlehem 
 
 XI. The Magi 
 
 XII. Nazareth, and the Early Days of Jesus 
 
 XIII. Early Boyhood 
 
 XIV. Social Influences .... 
 XV. The Passover Visit to Jerus.\lem 
 
 XVI. Early Years 
 
 XVII. Life under the Law . . 
 
 XVIII. JUDEA under ArCHELAUS and PiOME . 
 
 XIX. The Koman Procurators 
 
 XX. Herod Antipas and Christ's own Country 
 
 XXI. The Galiljeans and the Border Lands 
 
 XXII. Before the Dawn . . 
 
 XXIII. The Kingdom op Heaven is at Hand . 
 
 XXIV. The Voice in the Wilderness . 
 
 Ideas 
 
 PAGES 
 
 1-9 
 10-16 
 16-27 
 27-iO 
 41-47 
 
 47-53 
 
 53-66 
 
 66-73 
 
 73-80 
 
 80-87 
 
 87-9'J 
 
 99-112 
 
 112-127 
 
 127-136 
 
 136-147 
 
 147-155 
 
 155-165 
 
 165-181 
 
 181-189 
 
 190-197 
 
 197-206 
 
 206-221 
 
 221-235 
 
 235-24U
 
 VI 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTFR 
 
 
 
 
 PAGES 
 
 XXV. 
 
 The New Pkophet in the Wilderness 
 
 
 246-259 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 The Baptism of Jests and the Death of John 
 
 
 . 2C0-276 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 The Temptation 
 
 
 
 . 270-287 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 The Retuen fkom the Wilderness . 
 
 
 
 . 287-3''0 
 
 XXIX. 
 
 The Opening of Christ's Purlic Ministry 
 
 
 
 . 300-313 
 
 XXX. 
 
 Visit to Jerusalem ..... 
 
 
 
 . 314-324 
 
 XXXI. 
 
 From Jerusalem to Samaria 
 
 
 
 . 325-340 
 
 XXXII. 
 
 Opening of the Ministry in Galilue 
 
 
 
 . 340-348 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 Capernaum ....... 
 
 
 
 . 348-359 
 
 XXXIV. 
 
 Light and Darkness 
 
 
 
 . 359-373 
 
 XXXV. 
 
 The Choice of the Twelve, and the Seriio 
 Mount 
 
 N ON 
 
 THI 
 
 . 374-385 
 
 XXXVI. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount {continued ) . 
 
 
 
 . 385-394 
 
 XXXVII. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount {concluded ) . 
 
 
 
 . 394 408 
 
 XXXVIII. 
 
 Open Conflict 
 
 
 
 . 406-417 
 
 XXXIX. 
 
 Galilee ....... 
 
 
 
 . 418-420 
 
 XL. 
 
 Darkening Shadows — Life in Galil'je 
 
 
 
 . 426-435 
 
 XLI. 
 
 The Bursting op the Storm .... 
 
 
 
 433-410 
 
 XLII. 
 
 After the Storm 
 
 
 
 . 446-457 
 
 XLIII. 
 
 Dark and Bright 
 
 
 
 . 457-470 
 
 XLIV. 
 
 The Turn of the Day .... 
 
 
 
 . 470-485 
 
 XLV. 
 
 The Coasts of the Heathen 
 
 
 
 . 485-496 
 
 XL VI. 
 
 In Flight once more ..... 
 
 
 
 . 496-507 
 
 XLVII. 
 
 The Transfiguration 
 
 
 
 . 508-517 
 
 XLVIII. 
 
 Before the Feast . . . 
 
 
 
 . 517-527 
 
 XLIX. 
 
 At the Feast of Tabernacles . 
 
 
 
 527-538 
 
 L. 
 
 After the Feast 
 
 
 
 . 539-547 
 
 LI. 
 
 
 
 
 547-557 
 
 LII. 
 
 A Wandering Life 
 
 
 
 . 557-569 
 
 LIII. 
 
 In Perea ....... 
 
 
 
 . 569-584 
 
 LIV. 
 
 In Perea {continued) 
 
 
 
 584-601 
 
 LV. 
 
 Palm Sunday 
 
 
 
 . 601-615 
 
 LVI. 
 
 Jerusalem . . , t . • . 
 
 
 
 . 616-626 
 
 LVII. 
 
 The Interval . . . . . 
 
 
 
 626-640
 
 CONTENTS vii 
 
 CIIVrTEtt PAGES 
 
 LVin. Farewell to FiuExna . . 010-055 
 
 LIX. The Farewell 655-009 
 
 LX. The Arrest 603-079 
 
 LXI. The Jewish Trial 679-688 
 
 LXII. Before Pilate 688-70i 
 
 LXIII. Judas— The Crucifixion 704-720 
 
 LXIV. The Eesurrection and the Forty Days .... 720-739
 
 THE LIFE OP CHEIST. 
 
 -♦-•»^- 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 t I THE life of Jcsns Christ, which is to be told in these pages, must ever 
 -*- remain the noblest and most fruitful study for all men, of every age. 
 It is admitted, even by those of other faiths, that He Tvas at once a great 
 Teacher, and a living illustration of the truths He taught. The jMahometan 
 Avorld give Him the high title of MasMi (Messiah), and set Him above all 
 the prophets. The Jews confess admiration of His character and words, 
 as exhibited in the Gospels. Nor is there anj^ hesitation among the great 
 intellects of different ages, whatever their sjiecial position towards Chris- 
 tianity ; whether its humble disciples, or openly opposed to it, or carelessly 
 indifferent, or vaguely latitudinarian. 
 
 We all know how lowly a reverence is paid to Him in passage after 
 passage by Shakspere, the greatest intellect known, in its wide, n;auy. 
 sided splendour. Men like Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, and Milton, 
 set the name of Jesus Christ above every other. To show that no other 
 subject of stud}- can claim an equal interest, Jean Paul Richtcr tells us 
 that " the life of Christ concerns Him who, being the holiest among the 
 mighty, the mightiest among the holy, lifted with His pierced hand 
 empires off their hinges, and turned the stream of centuries out of its 
 channel, and still governs the ."ges." Spinoza calls Christ the symbol of 
 Divine wisdom ; Kant and Jacobi hold Him up as the sjanbol of ideal 
 perfection, and Schelling and Hegel as that of the union of the divine and 
 human. "I esteem the Gospels," says Goethe, "to be thoroughly genuino, 
 for thci'c shines forth from them the reflected splendour of a sul)limity, 
 proceeding from the })L'rson of Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the 
 Divine could ever have manifested upon earth." " How petty are the 
 books of the philosophers, with all their pomp," says Rousseau, " com- 
 pared with the Gospels ! Can it be that Avritings at once so sublime and 
 so simple are the work of men .P Can He whose life they tell be Himself 
 no more than a mere man? Is there anything, in His character, of the 
 enthusiast or the amljitious sectary ? Wliat sweetness, what purity in His 
 ways, what touching grace in His teachings ! What a loftiness in His 
 maxims, what profound wisdom in His words ! What presence of mind, 
 what delicacy and aptness in His replies ! What an empii-e over His 
 
 B
 
 2 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 passions ! AVhere is tlie man, wliere is the sage, wlio knows how to act, to 
 suffer, and to die without weakness and without display ? My friend, men 
 do not invent Hke this ; and the facts respecting Socrates, which no one 
 doubts, are not so well attested as those about Jesus Christ. These Jews 
 could never have struck this tone, or thought of this morality, and the 
 Gospel has characteristics of truthfulness so grand, so striking, so per- 
 fectly inimitable, that their inventors vfould be even more wonderful than 
 He whom they portray. Yes, if the dearth of Socrates be that of a sage, 
 the life and death of Jesus are those of a God." 
 
 Thomas Carlyle repeatedly expresses a similar reverence. " Jesus of 
 Nazareth,'' says he, "our divinest symbol ! Higher has the human thought 
 not yet reached." " A symbol of quite perennial, infinite character, whose 
 significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anev,r niade 
 manifest." Dr. Clianning, of Boston, the foremost man in his day among 
 American Unitarians, is equally marked in his words. " The character of 
 Jesus," says he, " is wholly inexplicable on human principles." Matthias 
 Claudius, one of the peojile's poets of Germany, last century, writes to a 
 friend, " No one ever thus loved [as Christ did], nor did anytliing so truly 
 great and good as the Bible tells us of Him ever enter into the heart of 
 man. It is a holy form which I'ises before the poor pilgrim like a star in 
 the night, and satisfies his innermost craving, his most secret yearnings 
 and hopes." " Jesus Christ," says the exquisite genius, Herder, " is in 
 the noblest, and most perfect sense, the realized ideal of humanity." 
 
 No one will accuse the first Napoleon of being either a pietist, or weak- 
 minded. He strode the world in his day like a Colossus, a man of gigantic 
 intellect, however Avortliless and depraved in a moral sense. Conversing 
 one day, at St. Helena., as his custom was, about the great men of antiquity, 
 and comparing himself with them, he suddenly turned round to one of his 
 suite and asked him, " Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was ? " The 
 ofiicer owned that he liad not yet taken much thought of such things. 
 " YleW, then," said Napoleon, " I will tell you." He then compared Christ 
 with himself, and with the heroes of antiquity, and showed how Jesus far 
 surpassed them. " I think I understand somewhat of human nature," he 
 continued, " and I tell you all these were men, and I am a man, Ijut not 
 one is like Him ; Jesus Christ was more tban man. Alexander, Cassar, 
 Charlemagne, and myself, founded great empires ; but upon what did the 
 creations of our genius depend ? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His 
 empire upon love, and to this very day millions woixld die for Him." 
 " The Gospel is no mere book," said he at another time, " but a living 
 creature, with a vigour, a povfcr, Avhich conquers all that opposes it. Here 
 lies the Book of Books upon the table [touching it reverently] ; I do not 
 tire of reading it, and do so daily with equal pleasure. The soul, charmed 
 Avitli the beauty of the Gospel, is no longer its own : God possesses it 
 entirely : He directs its thoughts and faculties ; it is His. What a proof 
 of the divinity of Jesus Christ ! Yet in this absolute sovereignty He has 
 but one aim — the spiritual perfection of the individual, the inirification of 
 his conscience, his union with what is tiaie, the salvation of his soul. Men 
 wonder at the conquests of Alexander, but here is a conqueror who draws
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 3 
 
 men to Himself for their highest good ; who unites to Himself, incorporates 
 into Himself, not a nation, but the ivhole human race ! " 
 
 I might multijily sucli testimonies from men of all ages and classes, 
 indefinitely ; let me give only one or two more. 
 
 Among all the Biblical critics of Germany, no one has risen with an 
 intellect more piercing, a learning more vast, and a freedom and fearless- 
 ness more uncpiestioned, than De Wette. Yet, listen to a sentence from 
 the preface to his Commentary on the Book of Revelation, published just 
 before his death, in 1849 : " This only I know, that there is salvation in no 
 other name than in the name of Jesus Christ, the Crucified, and that 
 nothing loftier offers itself to humanity than the God-manhood realized in 
 Him, and the kingdom of God which He founded — an idea and problem 
 not yet rightly understood and incorporated into the life, even of those 
 who, in other respects, justly rank as the most zealous and the warmest 
 Christians ! Were Christ in deed and in ti'uth our Life, how could such a 
 falling away from Him be possible ? Those in whom He lived would 
 witness so mightily for Him, through their whole life, whether spoken, 
 written, or acted, that unbelief would be forced to silence." 
 
 Nor is the incidental testimony to Christ of those who have openly ac- 
 knoAvledgcd their supreme devotion to Him less striking. There have 
 been martyrs to many creeds, but what religion ever saw an army of 
 martyrs willingly dying for the personal love they bore to the founder of 
 their faith ? Yet this has always been the characteristic of the martyrs 
 of Christianity, from the daj^s when, as tradition tells us, Peter was led to 
 crucifixion with the words ever on his lips, " None but Chi-ist, none but 
 Christ," or when the aged Polycarp, — about to he burned alive in the 
 amphitheatre at Smyrna, — answered the governor, who sought to make 
 him revile Christ — " Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He 
 never did me wrong : and how can I now blaspheme my King who has 
 saved me ? " iSTearly seventeen hundred years passed from the time when 
 the earlj^ confessor died blessing God that he was counted worthy to have 
 a share in the number of martyrs and in the cup of Christ ; and a man of 
 high culture and intellect lies dying, the native of an island peopled only 
 by outside barbarians in the days of Polycarp. The attendants, watching 
 his last moments, see his lips move, and bending over him, catch the faint 
 sounds, " Jesus, love ! — Jesus, love ! — the same thing,"— the last words 
 uttered before he left them. It was the death-bed of Sir James Macintosh. 
 Thus the character of Christ still retains the supreme charm by Avhich it 
 drew towards it the deepest affections of the heart in the earliest age 
 of the Church; and such a character must claim, above all others, oiu- 
 reverent and thoughtful stud3^ 
 
 If we attempt to discover what it is in the personal character of Jesus 
 Christ, as shown in His life, that thus attracts such permanent admiration, 
 it is not difficult to do so. 
 
 In an age when the ideal of the religious life was realized in the 
 Baptist's withdraAving from men, and burying himself in the ascetic 
 solitudes of the desert, Christ came, bringing religion into the haunts and 
 homes and evcry-day life of men. For the mortifications of the hermit
 
 4 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 He substituted the labours of active benevolence ; for the fears and gloom 
 whicli shrank from men, He brought the light of a cheerful piety, which 
 made every act of daily life religious. He found the domain of religion 
 fenced off as something distinct from commoiT duties, and He threw down 
 the wall of separation, and consecrated the whole sweep of existence. He 
 lived, a man amongst men, sharing alike their joys and their sorrows, 
 dignifying the humblest details of life by making them subordinate to 
 the single aim of His Father's glory. Henceforth the grand revolution 
 was inaugurated, which taught that religion does not lie in selfish or 
 morbid devotion to personal interests, whether in the desert or the temple, 
 but iu loving work and self-sacrifice for others. 
 
 The absolute unselfishness of Christ's character is, indeed, its unique 
 charm. His own life is self-denial throiighout, and He makes a similar 
 spirit the test of all healthy religious life. It is He who said, " It is more 
 blessed to give than to receive ; " who reminds us that life, like the Avheat, 
 yields fruit only by its own dying; who gave us the ideal of life in His 
 own absolute self-oblivion. We feel instinctively that this Gospel of Love 
 alone is divine, and that we cannot withhold our homage from the only 
 perfectly Unselfish Life ever seen on earth. 
 
 There is much, besides, to which I can only allude in a word. He 
 demands repentance from all, but never for a moment hints at any need 
 of it for Himself. With all His matchless lowliness. He advances per- 
 sonal claims which, in a mere man, would be the very delirium of religious 
 pride. He was divinely patient under evcT-y form of suffering, — a home- 
 less life, hunger and tliirst, craft and violence, meanness and pride, the 
 taunts of enemies, and betrayals of friends, ending in an ignominious 
 death. Nothing of all this for a moment tui-ned Him from His chosen 
 patli of love and pity. His last words, like His whole life, were a prayer 
 for those who returned Him evil for good. His absolute superiority to 
 everything narrow or local, so that He, a Jew, founds a religion iu which 
 all mankind are a common brotherhood, equal before God; the dignity, 
 calmness, and self-possession before rulers, priests, and governors, which 
 sets Him immeasurably above them ; His freedom from superstition, in 
 an age which was superstitious almost beyond example ; His superiority 
 to the merely external and ritual, in an age when rites and externals were 
 the sum of religion : all these considerations, to mention no others, explain 
 the mj'sterious attraction of His character, even when looked at only as 
 that of an ideal Mau. 
 
 When, from His character, we turn to His teachings, the claims of His 
 Life on our reverent study are still further strengthened. To Him we 
 owe the expansion of whatever was vital in Ancient Judaism, from the 
 creed of a tribe into a religion for the world. The Old Testament reveals 
 a sublime and touching description of God as the Creator and the All-wise 
 and Almighty Euler of all things ; as the God, in whose hand is the life 
 of every living thing and the Incath of all mankind; tlie God of Provi- 
 dence, on whom the eyes of all creatures wait, and who gives them their 
 meat in due season ; as a Being of infinite majesty, who will l)y no means 
 clear the guilty, but yet is merciful and gracious, longsutfcring, and
 
 INTRODUCTOEY. 6 
 
 abundant in goodness and truth ; as keeping mercy for thousands, for- 
 giving iniquity and transgression and sin, and as pitying them that fear 
 Him, like as a father pitieth his children. But it was reserved for Christ 
 to Ijring the character of God, as a God of Love, into full noon-day light, 
 in His so loving the world as to give His only-begotten Son, that whoso- 
 ever believeth in Him might not perish, but have eternal life. In the 
 New Testament He is first called in the widest sense the Father of all 
 mankind. The Old Testament proclaimed Him the God of Al^raham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob — the Portion of Israel : Christ points the ejcs of all 
 nations to Him as the God of the whole human race. 
 
 The fundamental princii)les of Christianitj^ are as new and as sublime 
 as this grand conception of God, and spring directly from it. The highest 
 ideal of man must ever be, that his soul reflects the image of his Creator, 
 and this image can only bo that of pure, all-eniln-acing love, to God and 
 man ; for God is love. Outward service, alone, is of no value : the pure 
 heart, onlj', loves aright : it, only, reflects the divine likeness ; for purity 
 and love are the same in the Eternal. A religion restins: on such a basis 
 bears the seal of heaven. But this divine law constitutes Christianity. 
 
 The morality taught by Christ is in keej^ing with such fundamental 
 demands. Since love is the fulfilling of the law, there can be no limitation 
 to duty but that of power. It can only be bounded by our possibilities of 
 performance, and that not in the letter, but in spirit and in truth, both 
 towards God and our neighbour. The perfect holiness of God can alone 
 be the standard of our aspiration : for love means obedience, and God 
 cannot look upon sin. To be a perfect Christian is to be a sinless man — 
 sinless through the obedience of perfect love. Such a morality has the 
 seal of the living God on its forehead. 
 
 It is to be remembered, in realizing our obligations to Christ, that there 
 was a perfect novelty in this teaching. Antiquity, outside the Jewish 
 world, had no conception of what we call sin. There is no word in Greek 
 for what we mean by it: the expression for it is synonymous with physical 
 evil. There was either no guilt in an action, or the deity was to blame, 
 or tlie action was irresistible. Priests and people had no aim or desire 
 in sacrifices, prayers, or festivals, beyond the removal of defilement, not 
 considered as a moral, but a physical stain ; and they attributed a magical 
 effect to propitiatory rites through which they thought to obtain that 
 removal ; this effect being sure to follow if tlicre were no omission in the 
 rite, even though the will remained consciously inclined to evil. 
 
 The Roman was as free from having any conception of sin as the Greek. 
 Even such moralists as Seneca had only a blind spiritual pride which 
 confounded God and nature, and regarded man — the crown of nature and 
 its most perfect work — as God's equal, or even as His superior, for the 
 divine nature, in his creed, reaches perfection in man only. Every man, 
 he tells us, carries God about with him in his bosom ; in one aspect of 
 his being he is God- virtue is only the following nature, and men's vices 
 are only madness. 
 
 Compare with this the vision of God — high and lifted up — of awful 
 lioliness but of infinite love, — and the doctrine of human responsibility,
 
 6 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 which the heart itself re-echoes — as taught by Christ ; and the study of 
 His hfe becomes the loftiest of humau duties. 
 
 We OTve it no less to Christ that the belief in a future life, with its light 
 or shadow depending on a future judgment, is now part of the creed of 
 the world. Judaism, indeed, in its later ages at least, knew these reyela- 
 tions, but Judaism could never have become the religion of mankind. 
 Pagan antiquity had ceased to have any fixed ideas of anything beyond 
 this life. Immortality was an open question ; the dream of poets rather 
 than the common faith. But Christ brought life and immortality to light 
 through the Gospel. 
 
 Doctrines such as these, illustrated by such a Life, and crowned by a 
 death v/hich He Himself proclaimed to be a voluntary offering " for the 
 life of the world," could not fail to have a mighty influence. 
 
 The leaven thus cast into the mass of humanity has already largely 
 transformed society, and is destined to aifect it for good, in ever-increasing 
 measure, in all directions. Tlie one grand doctrine of the Brotherhood of 
 Man, as man, is in itself the pledge of infinite results. The seminal prin- 
 ciple of all true progress must ever be found in a joroper sense of the 
 inherent dignity of manhood; in the realization of the truth that the 
 whole human race are essentially equal in their faculties, nature, and 
 inalienable rights. Such an idea was unknown to antiquity. The Jew, 
 speaking in the Fourth Book of Esdras, addressed God—" On our account 
 Thou hast created the world. Other nations, sprung from Adam, Thou 
 hast said are nothing, and are like spittle, and Thou hast likened their 
 multitude to the droppings from a cask. But we are Thy peo})le, whom 
 Thou hast called Thy first-born. Thine only -begotten, Thy av ell -beloved." 
 In the Book Sifri, the Rabbis tell us — " A single Israelite is of more 
 worth in the sight of God than all the nations of the world ; every Israelite 
 is of more value before Him tha.n all the nations who have been or will be." 
 
 To the G REEK, the Vv^ord " humanity," as a term for the wide brother- 
 hood of all races, was unknown. All races, except his own, were regarded 
 and despised as " barbarians." Even the Egyptians, in spite of their 
 ancient traditions and priestly "wisdom," — the Carthaginians, the 
 Phoenicians, Etruscans, Macedonians, and Romans, not to mention out- 
 lying and uncivilized peoples, were stigmatised by this contemptuous 
 name. The Greek fancied himself appointed Ijy the gods to be lord over 
 all other races ; and Socrates only gave expression to the general feelin"- 
 of his countrymen when he thanked the gods daily for being man and not 
 beast, male and not female, Greek and not barbarian. 
 
 The Roman, in common with antiquity at large, considered all wlio did 
 not belong to his own State as hostes, or enemies; and hence, imless there 
 were a special league, all Romans held that the only law between them 
 and those who were not Romans, was that of the stronger, by which they 
 were entitled to subjugate such races if they could, plunder their posses- 
 sions, and make the people slaves. The fact tliat a tribe lived on the bank 
 of a river on tlie other side of which Romans had settled, made its mem- 
 bers " rivals," for the word means simply the dwellers on opposite sides 
 of a stream. It -was even objected to Christianity, indeed, that its folly
 
 INTEODUCTOEY. 7 
 
 was patent, from its scoking to introduce one religion for all races, " The 
 man," says Celsus, " wlio can believe it possible for Greeks and Barbar- 
 ians, in Asia, Europe, and Libya, to agree in one code of religious laws, 
 must be utterly devoid of sense." Antiquity bad no conception of a re- 
 ligion Vv"hicb, by readily uniting vritb everything purely human, and as 
 readily attacking all forms of evil, could be destined or suited to the wants 
 of all humanity. ISTor did it deign to think that the aristocracy of the race 
 could stoop to have a religion in common with the barbarian to whom it 
 almost refused the name of man. 
 
 It was left to Christ to proclaim the brotherhood of all nations by 
 revealing God as their common Father in Heaven, filled towards them 
 with a father's love ; by His commission to preach the Gospel to all : by 
 His inviting all, without distinction, Avho laboured and were heavy laden, 
 to come to Him, as the Saviour sent from God, for rest ; by His receiving 
 the woman of Samaria and her of Canaan as graciously as any others ; 
 by His making Himself the friend of jDublicans and sinners ; by the tone 
 of such parables as that of Dives and Lazarus ; by His equal sympathy 
 with the slave, the beggar, and the ruler ; by the whole bearing and spirit 
 of His life ; and, above all, by His picture of all nations gathered to 
 judgment at the Great Day, with no distinction of race or rank, but 
 simply as men. 
 
 In this great principle of the essential equality of man, and his 
 responsibility to God, the germs lay hid of grand truths imperfectly 
 realized even yet. 
 
 Thus, it is to this we owe the conception of the rights of individual 
 conscience as opposed to any outward authority. There was no dream of 
 such a thing before Christ came. The play of individuality, which alone 
 secures and exemplifies those rights, was unknown or restricted. Among 
 the Greeks, the will of the State was enforced on the individual. Morality 
 and goodness were limited to what was voted by the majority as ex- 
 pedient for the well-being of the community at large. Wlien a man had 
 paid the gods the traditional sacrifices and ceremonies, he had little more 
 to do with them. Not only could he not act for himself freely in social or 
 private affairs ; his conscience had no liberty. The State was everything, 
 the man nothing. Eome knew as little of responsibility to higher laws 
 than its own, and had very limited ideas even of personal freedom. 
 Christ's words, " One is your ' Teacher,' and all ye are brethren ; " " One 
 is your ' Father,' even the Heavenly ; " " One is your ' Guide,' even the 
 Christ,'' were the inauguration of a social and moral revolution. 
 
 The SLAVE, before Christ came, was a piece of property of less worth 
 than land or cattle. An old Roman law enacted a penalty of death for 
 him who killed a ploughing ox ; Init the murderer of a slave was called to 
 no account whatever. Crassus, after the revolt of Spartacus, crucified 
 10,000 slaves at one time. Augustus, in violation of his word, delivered 
 to their masters, for execution, 30,000 slaves who had fought for Sextus 
 Pompeius. Trajan, the best of the Eomans of his day, made 10,000 slaves 
 fight at one time in the amphitheatre, for the amusement of the people, 
 and prolonged the massacre 123 days.
 
 8 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 The great truth of man's universal brotherhood was the axe laid at the 
 root ol this detestable crime — the sum of all villanies. By first infusing 
 kindness into the lot of the slave, then by slowly undermining slavery 
 itself, eacli century has seen some advance, till at last the man-owner is 
 unknown in nearly every civilized country, and even Africa itself, the 
 worst victim of slavery in these later ages, is being aided by Christian 
 England to raise its slaves into freemen. 
 
 Aggressive war is no less distinctly denounced by Christianity, which, 
 in teaching the brotherhood of man, proclaims war a revolt, abhorrent to 
 nature, of brothers against brothers. The voice of Christ, commanding 
 peace on earth, has echoed through all the centuries since His day, and 
 lias been at least so far honoured that the horrors of war are greatly 
 lessened, and that war itself — no longer the rule, but the exception — is 
 much rarer in Christian nations than in former times. 
 
 The POOR, in antiquity, were in almost as bad a plight as the slave. 
 " How can you possibly let yourself down so low as not to repel a poor 
 man from you with scorn " is the question of a rhetorician of the imperial 
 times of Home, to a rich man. ISTo one of the thousands of rich men 
 living ill Rome ever conceived the notion of founding an asylum for the 
 poor, or a hospital for the sick. There were herds of beggars. Seneca 
 often mentions them, and observes that most men fling an alms to a 
 beggar with repugnance, and carefully avoid all contact with him. 
 Among the Jews, the poor were thought to be justly bearing the penalty 
 of some sin of their own, or of their fathers. But we know the sayings 
 of Clirist — " It is more blessed to give than to receive : " "I was an 
 hungred, and ye gave me meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink ; I 
 was a stranger, and yc took me in ; naked, and ye clothed me ; I was 
 sick, and ye visited me ; I was in prison, and ye came unto me : " " Give 
 to tlie poor." The abject and forlorn received a charter of human rights 
 when He proclaimed that all men are brethren : sprung from the same 
 human stock ; sons of the same Almighty Father ; one family in Himself 
 the Head of regenerated humanity. 
 
 The, condition of woman in antiquity was little better than that of the 
 slave. She was the property of her husband, if married ; if unmarried, 
 she was the plaything or slave of man, never his equal. The morality of 
 married life, which is the strength and glory of any people, was hardly 
 known. Pompey and G ermanicus were singular in the fidelity that marked 
 their marriage-relations, on both sides, and were famous through the singu- 
 larity. The utter impurity of the men reacted in a similar self-degradation 
 of the other sex. In Rome, marriages became, as a rule, mere temporary 
 connections. In order to escape the punishments infiicted on adultery, in 
 the time of Tiberius, married women, including even women of illustrious 
 families, enrolled themselves on the official lists of public jirostitutes. St. 
 Paul only spoke the language which every one who knows the state oi 
 morals of those days must use, when he wrote the well-known verses in the 
 opening of his Epistle to the Romans. The barbarians of the German 
 forests, alone, of tlie heathen world, retained a worthy sense of the true 
 dignity of woman. " No one there laughs at vice/' says Tacitus, " nor is
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 9 
 
 to seduce and to be seduced called the fashion." " Happy indeed," con- 
 tinues the Roman, thinking of the state of things around him, " those 
 states in which only virgins marr}", and Avhcre the vow and heart of the 
 bride go together ! " " Infidelity is very rare among them." The tradi- 
 tions of a jjurer time still lingered beyond the Alps : the afterglow of 
 light that had set elsewhere. 
 
 These traditions, thus honoured in the forests of Germany, were 
 formulated in a supreme law for all ages and countries by Jesus Christ. 
 Except for one crime, husljand and w^ife, joined by God in marriage, were 
 not to be put asunder. Woman was no longer to be the toy and inferior 
 of man. Polygamy, the fruitful source of social corruption, was forbidden. 
 Man and woman were to meet on equal terms in lifelong union : each 
 honouring the other, and both training their children amidst the sanctities 
 of a pure family life. 
 
 The enforcement of these and kindred teachings, destined to regenerate 
 humanity, required lofty sanctions. That these are not wanting, in the 
 amjilest fulness, we have in part seen already, and shall see more and 
 more as we advance. Meanwhile, enoue-h has been said to show Avhv, 
 even apart from the mysterious dignity of His divine nature, God mani- 
 fest in the flesh, and even independently of His being the Lamb of God, 
 who takes away the sins of the world, Christ's life and sayings, alike unique 
 among men, deserve the reverent study of all. 
 
 " From first to last," said the great Napoleon, on one occasion, " Jesus 
 is the same; always the same — majestic and simple, infinitely severe 
 and infinitely gentle. Throughout a life passed under the public eye. He 
 never gives occasion to find fault. The prudence of His conduct compels 
 our admiration by its union of force and gentleness. Alike in speech and 
 action, He is enlightened, consistent, and calm. Sublimity is said to be 
 an attribute of divinity : what name, then, shall we give Him in whose 
 character were united every element of the sublime ? 
 
 " I know men ; and I tell you that Jesus is not a man. Everything in 
 Him amazes me. His spirit outreaches mine, and His will confounds luo. 
 Comparison is impossible between Him and any other being in the woi'ld. 
 He is truly a being by Himself. His ideas and His sentiments ; the truth 
 that He announces ; His manner of convincing ; are all beyond humanity 
 and the natural order of things. 
 
 " His birth, and the story of His life; the profoundness of His doctrine, 
 which overturns all difficulties, and is their most complete solution ; His 
 Gospel ; the singularity of His mysterious being ; His appearance ; His 
 empire; His progress through all centuries and kingdoms ;— all this is to 
 me a prodigy, an iinfathomable mystery. 
 
 " I see nothing here of man. Near as I may approach, closely as I may 
 examine, all remains above my comprehension — great with a greatness 
 that crushes me. It is in vain that I reflect — all remains unaccountable ! 
 
 " I defy you to cite another life like that of Christ.'*
 
 10 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 CliAPTER II. 
 
 THE HOLY LAND. 
 
 rpiIE contrast between the influences which have most affected the 
 world, and the centres from which they have sprung, is very striking. 
 Greece, the mother of philosophy and art, for all time, is not quite half the 
 size of Scotland ; Eome, the mighty mistress of the world, was only a 
 city of Italy ; Palestine, the l^irthplace of our Lord, and the cradle of 
 revelation, is about the size of Wales. From Dan, on the north, to Beer- 
 sheba, on the south, is a distance of only 139 miles ; and the paltry breadth 
 of twenty miles, from the coast to the Jordan, on the north, increases 
 slowly to only forty between the shore of the Mediterranean, at Gaza, and 
 the Dead Sea, on the south. 
 
 When it is remembered that America was unknown till within the last 
 four centuries, the position of Palestine on the map of the ancient world 
 was veiy remarkable. It seemed the very centre of the earth, and went 
 far to excuse the long-prevailing belief that Jerusalem was the precise 
 central point. On the extreme western limit of Asia, it looked eastward, 
 towards the great empires and religions of that mighty continent, and 
 westward, over the Mediterranean, to the promise of European civilization. 
 It was the connecting link between Eurojoe and Africa, which could then 
 boast of Egypt as one of the great centres of human thought and culture ; 
 and it had the dateless past of the East for its background. 
 
 Yet its position towai"ds other lands was not less striking than its real 
 or apparent isolation. Separated from Asia by the broad and impassable 
 desert, it was saved from becoming a purely Eastern country, either in 
 religion, or in the political decay and retrogression which have, sooner or 
 later, marked all Eastern States. Shut in, by a strip of desert, from 
 Egypt, it was kept, in great part, from the contagion of the gross immorality 
 and grosser idolatry of that land ; and its western coasts were washed by 
 the " Great Sea," which, for ages, was as much a mystery to the Jew, as 
 the Atlantic to our ancestors, before the era of Columbus. There could 
 have been no land in which the purpose of God to " separate " a nation 
 " from among all the jieople of the earth,'' to be the depositary of divine 
 truth, and the future missionaries of the world, could have been so per- 
 fectly carried out. Nor did its special fitness as a centre of heavenly 
 light amongst mankind pass away till the whole scheme of revelation had 
 been completed ; for by the time of Christ's death the Mediterranean had 
 become the highway of the nations, and facilitated the diffusion of the 
 Gospel to the cities and nations of the populous West, by the easy path 
 of its wide waters. The long seclusion of ages had already trained the 
 Jew in religious knowledge, when forced or voluntary dispersion sent 
 him abroad to all lands, with his lofty creed : the passing away of that 
 seclusion opened the world to the ready dissemination of the message of 
 the Cross. 
 
 It is an additional peculiarity of the Holy Land, in relation to the 
 history of religion, that its physical features, and its position, together,
 
 THE HOLY LAND. 11 
 
 brought it, from the earliest ages, in contact with the widest range of 
 peoples and empires. Egypt and it are two oases in wide-spreading 
 deserts, and as such attracted race after race. Vast migrations of 
 northern tribes towards the richer southern countries have marked all 
 ages ; and Egypt, as the type of fertility, was a special land of wonder, 
 to which these wandering populations ever turned greedy eyes. In a less 
 degree, the Holj Land shared this dangerous admiration. It was the 
 next link to Egypt in the chain of attractive conquests — Egypt itself 
 being the last. As in later times the Assyrian, the Chaldean, the Per.«ian, 
 the Greek, the Eoman, and the Tui-k successively coveted the valley of the 
 Nile, and took possession of it, so in the very eai-liest ages, as many 
 indications prove, wave after wave of immigration had overflowed it. In 
 all these inroads of nevv" nationalities, the Holy Land, as the highway to 
 Egypt, necessarily sliarcd, and hence, as centuries passed, race after race 
 was brought in contact with the Jew, in spite of his isolation, and the Jew 
 into contact with them. Such a fact was of great significance in the 
 religious education of the world. It leavened widely distant nations, 
 more or less, with the grand religious truths which had been committed to 
 the keeping of the Jew alone ; it led or forced him abroad to distant 
 regions, to learn, as well as to communicate ; and it reacted to ensiu-e the 
 intense religious conservatism to which the Jew, even to-day, owes his 
 continued national existence. That was a fitting scene, moreover, for the 
 advent of the Saviour of the world, in Avhich, small though its bounds. 
 He was suiTounded not by the Jew alone, but by a joopulation representing 
 a v/ide proportion of the tribes and nations of the then-known earth. 
 The inscription on the cross, in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, was the symbol 
 of the relation of Christ's life, and of His death, to all humanity. 
 
 But perhaps the most striking peculiarity of Palestine as the spot 
 chosen by God for His revelations of religious truth to our race, and for 
 the incarnation of the Saviour of mankind, is that it presents within its 
 narrow bounds the characteristics of climate and productions scattered 
 elsewhere over all the habitable zones — from the snowy north to the 
 tropics. The literature of a country necessarily takes the colour of its 
 local scenery and external nature, and hence a book written in almost any 
 land is unfitted for any other countries in wliich life and nature are differ- 
 ent. Thus the Koran, written in Arabia, is essentially an Eastern book, 
 in great measure unintelligiljle and uninteresting to nations living in 
 countries in any great degree different in climate and modes of life, from 
 Arabia itself. The sacred books of other religions have had only a local 
 reception. The Bible alone finds a welcome among nations of every 
 region over the earth. It is the one book in the world which men every- 
 where receive with equal interest and reverence. The inhabitant of the 
 coldest north finds, in its imagery, something that he can understand, and 
 it is a household book in multitudes of homes iai the sultriest regions of 
 the south. 
 
 Intended to carry the Truth to all nations, it was essential that the 
 Bible should have this cosmopolitan attractiveness. Yet it could not have 
 had it but that such a country as Palestine was chosen to produce it.
 
 12 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Witliin the narrow limits of that strip of coast, as we might call it, are 
 gathered the features of countries the most widely apart. The peaks of 
 Lebanon are never without patches of snow, even in the heat of summer. 
 Snow falls nearly every winter along the summits of the central ridge of 
 Palestine, and over the table-laud east of the Jordan, though it seldom 
 lies more than one or two days. On the otlier hand, in the Valley of tlie 
 Jordan, summer brings the heat of the tropics, and the different seasons, 
 in different parts, according to the elevation, exhibit a regular gradation 
 between these extremes. Thus, witliin the extent of a single landscape, 
 there is every climate, from the cold of Northern Europe to the heat of 
 India. The oak, the pine, the walnut, the maple, the juniper, the aider, 
 the poplar, the willow, the ash, the ivy, and the hawthorn, grow luxuriantly 
 on the heights of Hermon, Bashan, and Galilee. Hence the traveller 
 from the more northerly temperate lands finds himself, in some parts, 
 surrounded by the trees and vegetation of his own country. He sees the 
 apple, the pear, and the plum, and rejoices to meet the familiar wheat, 
 and barley, and peas, and potatoes, and cabbage, carrots, lettuce, endive, 
 and mustard. The Englisliman is delighted to find himself surrounded by 
 many of the flowers of his native land; for out of the 2,000 or 2,500 
 flowers of Palestine, perhaps 500 are British. It looks like home to see 
 the ranunculus, the yellow water-lily, the tulip, the crocus, the hj-acinth, 
 the anemone, mignonette, geraniums, mallows, the common bramble, the 
 dog-rose, the daisy, the well-known groundsel, the dandelion, — sage, and 
 thyme, and sweet marjoram, blue and white pimpernel, cyclamens, ver- 
 vain, mint, hoi'ehound, road-way nettles, and thistles ; and j^onds with 
 the wonted water-cress, duck-weed, and rushes. 
 
 The traveller from more southern countries is no less at home ; for 
 from whatever part he come, be it sunny Spain or AVestern India, he will 
 recognise well-known forms in one or other of such a list as the carob, the 
 oleander and willow, skirting the streams and watercourses; the sycamore 
 the fig, the olive, the date-palm, the pride of India, the pistachio, the 
 tamarisk, the acacia, and the tall tropical grasses and reeds ; or in such 
 fruits as the date, the pomegranate, the vine, the orange, the shaddock, 
 the lime, the banana, the almond, and the jirickly pear. The siglit of 
 fields of cotton, millet, rice, sugar-cane, maize, or even of Indian indigo, 
 and of patches of melons, gourds, pumpkins, tobacco, j'am, sweet potato, 
 and other southern or tropical field or garden crops, Avill carry him back 
 in thought to his home. 
 
 There can be no more vivid illustration of the climate of any land 
 than the vegetation it yields, and Palestine, tried by this test, reproduces 
 climates and zones which, in other countries, are separated by many hun- 
 dred miles. 
 
 A book written in such a land must necessarily be a reflection, in its 
 imagery and modes of thought, so far as they arc affected by external 
 nature, of much that is common to men all over the earth. The Scrip- 
 tures of the two Testaments have had this priceless help in their great 
 mission, from Palestine having been chosen by God as the land in which 
 tliey were written. The words of prophets and apostles, and of the great
 
 THE HOLY LAND. 13 
 
 Master Himself, sound familiar to all mankind, because spoken amidst 
 natural images and experiences common to all the ■world. 
 
 Though essentially a mountainous country, Palestine has many broad 
 and fertile plains. It is a highland district, intersected throughout, and 
 bordered on the western side, by rich, wide-spreading lowlands. 
 
 The plain on the western side extends from above Acre, with an inter- 
 ruption by Mount Carmel, along the whole coast, under the respective 
 names of the plain of Acre, the plain of Sharon, and the Shephelah, or 
 low country, the land of the Philistines in early ages. From this border 
 plain the country rises, throughout, into a table-land of an average height; 
 of from 1,500 to 1,800 feet above the Mediterranean ; the general level 
 being so even, and the hills so close together, that the whole length of the 
 country, seen from the coast, looks like a wall ri.sing from the fertile 
 plain at its foot. Yet the general monotony is broken, here and there, by 
 higher elevations. Thus, to begin from the south, Hebron is 3,029 feet 
 above the sea; Jerusalem 2,610; the Mount of Olives 2,721; Bethel 2,400; 
 Ebal and Gerizinr2,700 ; Little Hermon and Tabor, on the north side of 
 the plain of Esdraelon, 1,900; Safed 2,775 ; and Jebul Jcrmuk 4-,000. 
 
 'J'his lonsr sea of hills is full of vallcvs running east and west, which 
 form so many arms of torrent beds, opening into the Jordan valley or 
 the Mediterranean. These valleys, on the eastern side of the water-shed, 
 towards Jordan, are extremely steep and rugged; as, for instance, the 
 precipitous descent between Mount Olivet and Jericho, which sinks over 
 4,000 feet in a distance of about fifteen miles. The great depression of 
 the Jordan valley makes such rugged and difficult mountain gorges the 
 only passes to the upper country from the east. There is not a spot, till 
 the plain of Esdraelon joins the valley of the Jordan, open enough to 
 manajuvre more than a small body of foot soldiers. The western valleys 
 slope more gently, but, like the eastern, are the only means of commu- 
 nication with the plains, and offer such difficulties as explain the security 
 of Israel in ancient times, entrenched among hills which, at the best, could 
 be reached only by rough mountain passes. The Jew lived, in fact, in a 
 strong mountain fastness stretching like a long wall behind the plain 
 beneath. 
 
 The appearance and fertility of this highland region, Avhich, alone, was 
 at any time the Holy Land of the Jcavs, varies in different parts. The 
 southern district, bcloAV Hebron, is a gradual transition from the desert, 
 from which it is approached in slow ascent. It was known in Bible times 
 as the Negeb, or south country, and is an uninviting tract of barren 
 uplands. As we pass north into the hills of Judah and Benjamin there is 
 somewhat more fertility, but the landscape is monotonous, bare, and unin- 
 viting in the extreme, for most of the year. In spring, even the bald, 
 grey rocks which make up the view are covered with verdure and bright 
 tiowers, and the ravines arc filled with torrents of rushing water, but in 
 summer and autumn the look of the country from Hebron up to Bethel is 
 very dreary and desolate. The flowers vanish with the first fierce rays of 
 the summer sun : they arc " to-day in the field, to-morrow cast into the 
 oven."' The little upland phvius, which, with their gi-een grass, and green
 
 14 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 corn, and smooth surface, relieve tlis monotony of the mountain-tops 
 farther north, are not found in Judea, and are rare in Benjamin. The 
 soil, alike on plain, hill, and glen, is poor and scanty. Natural wood 
 disappears, and a few small bushes, brambles, or aromatic shrubs, alone 
 appear on the hillsides. " Rounded hills, chiefly of a gi'ey colour," says 
 Dean Stanley — " grey partly from the limestone of which they are formed, 
 partly from the tufts of grey shrub with which their sides are thinly 
 clothed ; their sides formed into concentric rings of rock, which must have 
 served in ancient times as supports to the terraces, of which there are 
 still traces to the very summits ; vallej^s, or rather the meetings of those 
 grey slopes with the beds of dry water-courses at their feet— long sheets 
 of bare rock laid like flagstones, side by side, along the soil — these are the 
 chief features of the greater part of the scenery of the historical parts 
 of Palestine. These rounded hills, occasionally stretching into long 
 undulating ranges, are for the most part bare of wood. Forest and large 
 timber are not known." Fountains are rare in this district ; and wells, 
 covered cisterns, and tanks cut out in the soft white limestone, take their 
 place. 
 
 Such arc the central and northern highlands of Judea. In the west 
 and north-western parts, Avhich the sea-breezes reach, the vegetation is 
 more abundant. Olives abound, and give the country in some places almost 
 a wooded appearance. The terebinth, with its dark foliage, is frequent, 
 and near the site of Kirjath-jearim, " the city of forests," there are some 
 thickets of pine and laurel. 
 
 But the eastern part of these hills — a tract nine or ten miles in width 
 oy about thirty-five in length — Vjetween the centre and the steep descent 
 to the Dead Sea — is, and must always have been, in the truest sense a 
 desert. Van de Velde well describes it as a bare arid wilderness : an 
 endless succession of shapeless, yellow, and ash-coloured hills, without 
 grass or shrubs, without water, and almost without life. Another travel- 
 ler speaks of it as a wilderness of mountain-tops, in some places tossed 
 up like waves of mud, in others wrinkled over with ravines, like models 
 made of crumpled brown paper, the ncai'er ones whitish, strewn with rocks 
 and bushes. Such is the desert or v\'ilderness of Judea, the scene of the 
 earlier retirement of John the Baptist, and tlie popularly supposed scene 
 of the temptation of our Lord. 
 
 Though thus barren and uninviting as a whole, in our day, the universal 
 presence of ruins proves that Judah and Benjamin had a teeming popu- 
 lation in former ages. Terrace cultivation utilized the whole surface, 
 where there was the least soil ; and in such a climate, with an artificial 
 supplj' of water, luxuriant fertility might be secured everywhere except on 
 the bare rock. The destruction of these terraces has doubtless allowed 
 much soil to be washed into the valleys, and lost, and the cutting down 
 of the natural forests, of which there are still traces, must have greatly 
 diminished the supply of water. Even in the now utterly barren districts 
 of " the south " abundant proofs have been discovered that cultivation 
 was anciently extensive. The fact that there are no perennial streams 
 in the western wadys, while there are mouy in those trending to the
 
 THE HOLY LAND. 15 
 
 Jordan on both sides, where the forests or thick shrubberies of ole- 
 anders and other flowering trees still flourish, speaks volumes as to the 
 cause of the present sterility. 
 
 Passing northward from Judea, the country gradually opens and is 
 more inviting. Eich plains, at flrst small, but becoming larger as we get 
 north, stretch out between the hills, till at last, near Nablous, we reach 
 one a mile broad and six miles long. The valle3's running west are long, 
 winding, and mostly tillable : those on the east are less deep and aljrupt 
 than farther south, and, being abundantly watered by numerous fountains, 
 are rich in orange groves and orchards. jS'ablous itself is surrounded l)y 
 immense groves of olive-trees, planted on all the hills around. Nowhere 
 in Palestine are there nobler brooks of water. The rich uplands produce 
 abundant crops of grain when cultivated ; yet it is, on the whole, a region 
 specially adapted for olives, vineyards, and orchards. The mountains, 
 though bare of wood, and but partially cultivated, have none of that arid, 
 worn look of those of some parts farther south. 
 
 ISTorth-west of the city of Xablous the mountains gradually sink down 
 into a wide plain, famous as that of Sharon, mostly an expanse of sloping 
 downs, but dotted here and there with hugh fields of corn and tracts of 
 wood recalling the county of Kent, and reaching to the southern slopes 
 of Carmel, with their rich woods and park-like scenery. 
 
 Passing still northward, from Samaria to Galilee, another wide plain of 
 great fertility — that of Esdraelon — stretches out from the northern side 
 of the luxuriant Carmel. It might, under a good government, yield vast 
 crops, but the inhabitants are few and poor, and tillage is imperfect. 
 The country now rapidly improves. Vegetation is much more luxuriant 
 among the hills of Galilee than elsewhere west of the Jordan. Fountains 
 are abundant and copious, and many of the torrent beds are never dry. 
 The hills become more and more richly wooded with oaks aiid terebinths, 
 while ravines occur here and there thickly clothed, in addition, with the 
 maple, arbutus, sumach, and other trees. The hills of Judea are barren ; 
 those of Samaria have been well compared to the hilly districts south of 
 Scotland ; but those of Galilee are more like the rich hills of Surrey. 
 Yet the whole region is thinly peopled. This highland paradise has far 
 fewer inhabitants than even the bleak mountains of Judea, where for 
 miles and miles, there is often no appearance of life, except the occasiona) 
 goat-herd on the hill-side, or the gathering of women at the wells. 
 
 The coast of the Holy Land, as has been said, is a long plain. This, on 
 the north, is a mere sti'ip, till near Acre, Ijut it spreads out from that 
 point, into a flat, i-ich, loamy plain, at first only a few feet above the sea 
 level. Coi'n-fields and pasture-lands reach several miles inland. South 
 of Carmel it expands into the ])lain of Sh;iron, now left bare and parched 
 in many parts ; its ancient forests long ago destroyed, except in stray 
 spots, and cultivation little known. As we go south, the soil is lighter 
 and drier, and the vegetation is scantier, till we reach the Shephelah, or 
 " low country" of the Bible, the ancient Philistia, Avhich begins in rolling 
 downs, and passes into wide-spreading cornfields and vast expanses of 
 loamy soil to the far south.
 
 IG THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 The eastern boundary of Palestine is the deep chasm in which the Jordan 
 has its channel. The name of that river indicates its course : it means 
 "the descender." Eising in the mountains of Lebanon, it flows south, 
 through the marshy Lake Merom and the Lake of Galilee, to the Dead 
 Sea, in a course of about 150 miles. From the Lake of Galilee, its channel 
 is a deep cleft in the mountain range, from north to south, and so broken 
 is its current that it is one continued rapid. Its bed is so crooked that it 
 has hardly half a mile straight ; so deep, moreover, is it, below the surface 
 of the adjacent country, that it can only be approaclied by descending one 
 of the steep mountain valleys, and it is invisiljle till near its entrance into 
 the Dead Sea, at a level of 1,317 feet below that of the Mediterranean. 
 There is no town on its banks, and it has in all ages been crossed at tlie 
 same fords ; no use can be made of it for irrigation, and no vessel can sail 
 the sea into which it pours its waters. It is like no other river. 
 
 CHAPTER IIL 
 
 PALESTINE AT THE TIME OF CIIIIIST. 
 
 A T the birth of Christ the striking spectacle presented itself, in a 
 ■^-^ degree unknown before or since, of the world united under one 
 sceptre. From the Euphrates to the Atlantic ; from the mouths of the 
 Rhine to the slopes of the Atlas, the Roman Emjieror was the solo lord. 
 The Mediterranean was, in the truest sense, a Roman lake. From the 
 pillars of Hercules to the mouths of the Nile, on its southern shores ; from 
 the farthest coast of Spain to Syria, on its northern ; and thence round 
 to the Nile again, the midtitudes of iTien now divided into separate nations, 
 often hostile, always distinct, reposed in peace under the shadow of the 
 Roman eagles. There might be war on the far eastern frontier, beyond 
 the Euphrates, or with the rude tribes in the German forests on the north, 
 but the vast Roman world enjoyed the peace and security of a great 
 organic whole. The merchant or the traveller might alike pass freely 
 from land to land ; trading vessels might bear their ventures to any port, 
 for all lands and all coasts were under the same laws, and all mankind, 
 for the time, were citizens of a common State. 
 
 At the head of this stupendous empire, a single man, Octavianus CfEsar 
 — now better known by his imposing title, Augustus— ruled as absolute 
 lord. All nations bowed before him, all kingdoms served him. It is 
 impossible for us, in the altered condition of things, to realize adequately 
 the majesty of such a position. Rome itself, the cajjital of this unique 
 empire, was itself unique in those ages. Its population, with its suburbs, 
 has been variously estimated ; some writers, as Lepsius, supposing it to 
 have been eight millions, others, like Do Quincey, setting it down as not 
 less than four millions at the very least, and not impossibly lialf as many 
 more. On the other hand, Merivale gives it as only half a million, while 
 others make it two millions and a half. Gibl>on estimates it at twelve 
 hundred thousand, and is supported in his supposition by Dean Milraan,
 
 PALESTINE AT THE TIME OF CHRIST. 17 
 
 The truth lies probably between the extremes. But the unique grandeur 
 of Rome Avas independent of any question as to its size or population : 
 the fact that arrested all minds was, rather, that a mere citj' should be the 
 resistless mistress of the habitable world. 
 
 Eound the office and person of the Cissar, who onlj-, of all rulers, before 
 or since, was in the widest sense a inonarcli of the whole race of men — • 
 that is, one ruling alone, over all nations — there necessarily gathered 
 peculiar and incommunicable attributes of grandeur. Like the far- 
 stretching highways which rayed out from the golden milestone in the 
 Roman Forum to the utmost frontiers, the illimitable majesty of the 
 emperor extended to all lands. On the shadowy, resistless, uncertain, but 
 ever-advancing frontiers of a dominion which embraced almost the whole 
 habitable world, as then known, tlie commands issued from the imperial 
 city were as resistless as in Italy. There were, doubtless, some uiiknown 
 or despised empires or tribes, outside the vast circumference of the Roman 
 sway, but they were regarded, at the best, as Britain looks on the wander- 
 ing hordes, or barbarous and powerless empires, beyond the limits of her 
 Indian possessions. Gibbon has set the grandeur of Rome in a vivid 
 light, by doscriljing the position of a sul:)3ect who should attempt to flee 
 from the wrath of a Caesar. " The empire of the Romans,"' says he, 
 " filled the world, and when that empire fell into the hands of a single 
 person, the world became a safe and dreary prison for his enemies. The 
 slave of imperial despotism, whether he was condemned to drag his 
 gilded chain in Rome and the Senate, or to wear out a life of exile on the 
 barren rock of Seriphus, or on the frozen banks of the Danube, expected 
 his fate in silent despair. To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to 
 fly. On every side he was encompassed with a vast extent of sea and 
 land, which he could never hope to traverse without being discovered, 
 seized, and restored to his irritated master. Beyond the frontiers, his 
 anxious view could discover nothing except the ocean, inhospitable deserts, 
 hostile tribes of barbarians, of fierce manners and unknown language, or 
 dependent kings, who would gladly purchase the emperor's protection by 
 the sacrifice of an obnoxious fugitive. ' Wherever you are,' said Cicero to 
 the exiled Marcellus, ' remember that you are equally within the power 
 of the conqueror.' " 
 
 At the birth of Christ this amazing federation of the world into one 
 great monarchy had been finally achieved. Augustus, at Rome, was the 
 sole power to which all nations looked. His throne, like the " exceeding 
 high mountain " of the Temptation, showed " all the kingdoms of the 
 world and their glory," spread out around it, far beneath, as the earth lies 
 in the light of the sun. ISTo prince, no king, or potentate, of any name, 
 could break the calm which such a universal dominion secured — "a calm," 
 to use De Quincey's figure, " which, through centuries, continued to lave, 
 as with the quiet undulations of summer lakes, the sacred footsteps of the 
 Cossarean throne." 
 
 It was in such a unique era that Jesus Christ was born. The whole 
 earth lay hushed in profound peace. All lands lay freely open to the 
 message of mercy and love which He came to announce. 
 
 c
 
 18 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Nor was tlie social and moral condition of the world at large, at the 
 birth of Christ, less fitting for His advent than the political. The j^rize 
 of universal power struggled for through sixty years of plots and desola- 
 ting civil wars, had been won at last, by Augustus. Sulla and Marius, 
 Pompey and Ctesar, had led their legions against each other, alike in Italy 
 and the Provinces, and had drenched the earth with blood. Augustus 
 himself had reached the throne only after thirteen years of war, which 
 involved regions v/ide apart. Tlie world was exhausted by the prolonged 
 agony of such a strife ; it sighed for repose, and perhaps never felt a more 
 universal joy than when the closing of the Temple of Janus in the 
 twenty-ninth year before Christ announced that at last the earth was at 
 peace. 
 
 The religions of antiquity had lost their vitality, and become effete 
 forms, without influence on the heart. Philosophy was the consolation of 
 a few — the amusement or fashion of others ; but of no weight as a moral 
 force among men at large. On its best side, that of Stoicism, it had much 
 that was lofty, but its highest teaching was resignation to fate, and it 
 offered only the hurtful consolation of pride in virtue, without an idea of 
 humiliation for vice. On its worst side — that of Epicureanism — it exalted 
 self-indulgence as the highest end. Faith in the great truths of natural 
 religion was well-nigh extinct. Sixtj^-three years before the birth of 
 Christ, Julius Caesar, at that time the Chief Pontiff of Eome, and, as such, 
 the highest functionary of the state religion, and the official authority in 
 religious questions, openly proclaimed, in his speech in the Senate, in re- 
 ference to Catiline and his fellow-conspirators — that there was no such 
 thing as a future life ; no immortality of the soul. He opposed the 
 execution of the accused on the ground that their crimes deserved the 
 severest punishments, and that, therefore, they should be kept alive to 
 endure them, since death was in rcalitj" an escape from suffering, not an 
 evil. " Death," said he, " is a rest from troubles to those in grief and 
 misery, not a punishment ; it ends all the evils of life ; for there is neither 
 care nor joy beyond it." 
 
 Nor was there any one to condemn such a sentiment even from such 
 lips. Cato, the ideal Roman, a man whose aim it was to "fulfil all right- 
 eousness," in tiie sense in which he understood it, passed it over with a 
 few words of light banter ; and Cicero, wlio was also present, did not care 
 to give either assent or dissent, but left the question open, as one which 
 miglit be decided either v/ay, at pleasure. 
 
 Morality was entirely divorced from religion, as may be readily judged 
 by the fact that the most licentious rites had their temples, and male and 
 female ministrants. In Juvenal's words, " the Syrian Orontes had flowed 
 into the Tiber," and it brought with it the appalling immorality of the 
 East. Doubtless, here and there, throughout the empire, the light of holy 
 traditions still burned on the altars of many a household ; but it availed 
 nothins; against the thick moral ni-'ht that had settled over the earth at 
 large. The advent of Christ was the breaking of the " dayspring from on 
 high" through a gloom that had been gathering for ages; a great light 
 dawning on a world wliich lay in darkness, and in the shadow of death.
 
 PALESTINE AT THE TIME OF CHRIST. 19 
 
 To understand the condition of things in the Holy Land in the lifetime 
 of Jesus, it is necessary to notice the history of the reign that was closing 
 at His birth, for religious and political affairs acted and reacted on the 
 spirit of the nation as only two phases of the same thing. 
 
 The reign of Alexander Jannaeus, of the Maccabrean or Asmonean line, 
 had been marked by the bitterest persecutions of the Pharisaic party, 
 whose insolence and arrogant claims had caused the king to throw him- 
 self into the hands of their Sadducean rivals. After his death these dis- 
 putes continued under Queen Alexandra, who favoured the Pharisees, but 
 the disquiet culminated, after her death, in the far worse evil of a civil 
 war between her two sons ; the elder, Hyrcanus, a weak, indolent man ; 
 the younger, Aristobulus, on the other hand, bold and energetic. Hyrcanus 
 had been made high priest, and Aristobulus had been kept from all power 
 during Alexandra's life— the Pharisaic party themselves holding the reins 
 of government ; but she was hardly dead before Aristobulus forced his 
 brother to resign the throne, to which he had succeeded, arnd left him 
 only the high priesthood. Hyrcanus would, apparently, have quietly 
 acquiesced in this change, but the evil genius of Aristobulus and of 
 the nation was present in the person of an influential Edomite, Antipater, 
 who had gained the confidence of Hyrcanus. Stirred up l)y this crafty 
 intriguer, the elder brother re-claimed the throne — Arab allies were 
 called in — Jerusalem was besieged, a.nd both the brothers appealed to the 
 Roman generals in Syria for a decision between them. As the result, 
 Pompey, then commanding in the East, appeared on the scene, in the year 
 63 "B.C. ; got possession of the country by craft ; stormed the Temple, 
 which held out for Aristobulus, and inaugurated a new era in Palestine. 
 The Pharisees had hoped that both of the brothers Avould be put aside, 
 and the theocracy, which meant their own rule, restored ; but Pompey, 
 while withholding the name of king, set up Hyrcanus as high priest and 
 ruler, under the title of ethnarch. All the conquests of the Maccab^ans 
 were taken from him : the country was redistributed in arbitrary political 
 divisions ; the defences of Jei'usalem throv/n down, and the nation sub- 
 jected to triljute to Rome. This, itself, would have been enough to kindle 
 a deep hatred to their new masters, but the seeds of a still more profound 
 enmity were sown, even at this first step in Roman occupation, by 
 Pompey and his staff insisting on entering the Holy of Holies, and thus 
 committing what seemed to the Jev/ the direst profanation of his re- 
 ligion. 
 
 Antipater had allied himself from the first with Rome as the strongest, 
 and was now the oljject of furious hatred. The nation had supposed that 
 Pompey came as a friend, to heal their dissensions, but found that he re- 
 mained as their master. Their independence was lost, and Antipater had 
 been the cause of its ruin. It is perhaps of him that the author of the 
 Psalms of Solomon speaks when he says, " Why sittest thou, the unclean 
 one, in the Sanhedrim and thy heart is far from the Lord, and thou 
 stirrest up with thy sins the God of Israel ? " Treachery, hypocrisy, 
 adultery, and murder are charged against him, and he is compared to a 
 biting serpent. Yet the guilt of the -ijcojjIc, it is owned, had brought
 
 20 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 these calamities on tliem. Tlirougli this, tlie ram had battered the holj 
 "walls, the Holy of Holies had been profaned, the noblest of the Sanhedrim 
 slain, and their sons and daughters carried off captive to the West, to 
 grace Pompey's triumph. At the thought of this the Psalmist is still 
 more cast down, and humbles himself in the dust before the retributive 
 hand of Jehovah. 
 
 But there was no peace for Israel. War lingered on the southern 
 borders, and in B.C. 67 Alexander, the son of Aristobulus, once more over- 
 threw the government of Hyrcanus and Antipater, but the Romans 
 forthwith came in force, and crushed the revolt by another conquest of 
 Jerusalem. In this campaign a cavalry colonel, Mark Antony, so espe- 
 cially distinguished himself, that the keen-sighted Antipater, seeing he 
 had a great future, formed friendly relations with him, which led to the 
 weightiest results in later years. 
 
 Hyrcanus and his favourite were now again in power, but they had a 
 troubled life. The people rose again and again, only to be as constantly 
 crushed. In B.C. 56, Aristobulus, who had escaped from Rome, began the 
 war once more, and the next year, his son Alexander made another vain 
 revolt. In B.C. 52, when the Parthians had revenged themselves by the 
 destruction of the legions of Crassus— who, in time of peace, had plundered 
 the Temple to fill his own treasures — the Jews rose still once more, but 
 Cassius, who had escaped with the wreck of the army of Crassus from the 
 Parthian horsemen, soon crushed the insurrection, and Antipater emerged 
 as, at last, the unfettered lord of the country. 
 
 The civil war which broke out, in the year 49, between Pompey and 
 Ca3sar, for a time promised a change. Judea, like all the East, adhered 
 to Pompey, and Caesar therefore set the imprisoned Aristobulus free, and 
 gave him two legions to clear his native countiy of the adherents of his 
 rival. Antipater and Hyrcanus already trembled at the thought of a 
 popular revolt, supported by Rome, when news came that Aristobulus 
 had suddenly died— no doubt of poison — and that his son Alexander had 
 been beheaded, in Antioch, by Pompey's orders. Antipater had thus 
 managed to get his enemies out of the way. When Pompey's cause was 
 finally crushed, next year, at Pharsalia, Hyrcanus and Antipater, like the 
 princes round them, were in a false position. Six weeks later, Pompey 
 lay murdered on the Egyptian sands.' Meanwhile, Cassar, who had landed 
 in Egypt, at the head of hardly 4,000 men, to settle the disputes for the 
 throne of that country, was attacked by the native soldiery and the rest- 
 less population of Alexandria, and reduced to the most desperate straits. 
 At this moment a motley army of Eastern vassals came to his relief, 
 anxious to efface at the eai-liest opportunity the remembrance of their 
 relations to Pompey. It included hordes of Arabs from Damascus, and 
 bands of Itureans from beyond Jordan, but its strength lay in 3,000 
 chosen troops brought by Antipater. The strange host was nominally 
 commanded by Mithridates of Pergamos, a bastard of the great Mithri- 
 dates, but Antipater was the real head. He induced the Bedouin leaders 
 on the opposite side to withdraw, and persnadcd the Egyptian Jews to 
 supply Cassar Avith provisions. After fierce fighting, the Roman fortune
 
 PALESTINE AT THE TIME OF CHRIST. 21 
 
 triumphed, and Ctesar, now enamoured of Cleopatra, then one-and-twenty 
 3^ears of age, remained conqueror. Alexandria was heavily punished : the 
 Egyptian Jews received extensive privileges, but the affairs of Palestine 
 were left to be settled when Cassar came ))ack from Pontus, in Asia 
 Minor, to which he had been summoned to repel an invasion from Armenia. 
 
 On his return to Syria, in the autumn of the year 47, Antijiater hastened 
 to meet him, as did also Antigonus, a son of Aristobulus. But the wounds 
 of Antipater, received in rescuing Ctesar from destruction, weighed more 
 than the hereditary claims of Antigonus, who, feeling this, fled to the 
 Parthians, to seek the aid which Rome refused. In other respects, the 
 Jews were treated in the friendliest way. Those of Lesser Asia were 
 confirmed in the privilege of unchecked remittance of their Temple con- 
 tributions to Jerusalem. Their synagogues were put under the protection 
 of the Temple laws, and they were once more granted immunity from all 
 demands for pul^lic ser-vice on the Sabbath, and on the jireparation-day, 
 from the sixth hour. In Palestine, Hyrcanus was sanctioned as high 
 priest ; the five divisions of the land previously made were put aside, and 
 the whole united under Antipater, as procurator. The Jews in all thcs 
 towns of Syria and Phenicia were put on the same favoured footing as 
 those of the Holy Land itself. ISTo troops Avere to bo raised in Judea, nor 
 any Roman garrisons introduced. The Temple tax and the Roman dues 
 were regulated according to Jewish usage. Hyrcanus, as high priest, 
 received the rank of a Roman senator, and was made hereditary ethnarch, 
 with the right of life and death, and of legal decision on all questions of 
 ritual. Still more, the right was granted to fortify Jerusalem again, and 
 Antipater, for his own reward, was made a Roman citizen, with freedom 
 from taxes on his property. The Idumean dynasty may be said to have 
 begun from this date, as the procuratorship granted to Antipater made 
 him henceforth independent of Hyrcanus. All these concessions he took 
 care to have forthwith confirmed at Rome, and graven on plates of 
 brass. 
 
 These diplomatic successes, hoAvever, failed to make Antipater popular. 
 He assumed some of the public duties of Hyrcanus, to show tlie Sanhedrim 
 that the civil power had been rightly transferred from the incapable hands 
 of the high priest. But the suspicion sank ever deeper in the popular 
 mind, that the final setting aside of the Maccabasan family was designed, 
 and it was even said that the Essenc Menahcm had told Herod, Antipater's 
 son, years before, as he met him on the street, that he Avould grow up to 
 be the scourge of the Maccabajans, and would in the end wear the crown 
 of David. Yet Hyrcanus could not shake himself free, even had he had 
 the energy to do so, for he needed the help of the alien to protect him 
 against his own family. His daughter Alexandra had lost, on his account, 
 both husband and father-in-law, by foul or legal murder. His nephew, 
 Antigonus, lived in a foreign land as a claimant of the throne; his grand- 
 children were the orphans of Alexander, who had fallen under the axe of 
 the headsman. The house of the Idumean, the alien in Israel, was nearer 
 to him than his own flesh and blood. 
 
 Antipater, in accordance with the tradition of his house, had married a
 
 22 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 daughter of the Bodouins — the fair Kypros— to preserve the connection 
 with the sheikhs of the desert by which liis father had grown rich. She 
 bore him four sons, Phasael, Herod, Joseph, and Pheroras, and a daughter, 
 Salome. Of these, Antipatei^ as ruler of the country, named Phasael 
 governor of Jerusalem, and Herod — a young man of twenty-five — he sent 
 to Galilee, to put down the bands of desperadoes, who thickly infested it, 
 half robbers, half religious zealots, fighting against the hated Eomans. 
 Herod was well qualified to maintain the honour of liis house. He was a 
 fearless rider, and no one threw the spear so straight to the mai-k, or shot 
 his aiTow so constantly into the centre. Even in later years, when 
 strength and agility begin to fail in most, he was known to have killed 
 forty wild beasts in one day's hunting. Herod took prisoner Hezekiah, 
 the dreaded leader of the " robbers,'' and his whole band, and put them 
 all to death. But his success only enraged the patriots of Jerusalem. In 
 violation of the right put exclusively into the hands of Hyrcanus, as high 
 priest, by Cassar, he had slain free Jews — and these, men fighting for the 
 Law, and against the heathen intruders into the heritage of Jehovah ; and 
 the Sanhedrim — the high coimcil— forced their nominal leader, whose 
 legal prerogative had been thus invaded, to summon the offender before 
 them. Herod obeyed, after having made Galilee safe, but appeared with 
 a powerful escort ; and at the same time, a message was sent by the 
 pro-consul of Syria not to injure him. He would, however, have been 
 sentenced to death, had not Hyrcanus left the chair, and counselled his 
 young friend to leave Jerusalem. Gnashing his teeth, Herod rode off to 
 Damascus, to the proconsul, from whom he shortly after boiTght the 
 governorship of Coele-Syria and Samaria, for which, as a Eoman citizen, 
 he was qualified, returning soon after, with a strong force to Jerusalem, 
 to avenge the insult offered him. But, at the entreat}^ of his father, 
 whom his boldness confirmed in authority, he withdrew, without vio- 
 lence. 
 
 All Palestine was now in the hands of Herod's house, for Antipater 
 ruled Judea, and Herod himself was over Samaria and Coele-Syria. The 
 Roman generals were uncertain whom to follow. Caesar's fortunes 
 seemed waning in Africa. Bassus, one of Pompey's party, seized Tyre, 
 and sought to seduce the soldiers of Sextus Caesar, the Syrian proconsul. 
 Antipater sent a mixed force, and Herod led the cavalry of Samaria, to 
 the proconsul's help. Bassus v.^as beaten, but Sextus Cajsar himself was 
 murdered by his own soldiers, and for two years Phasael and Herod had 
 to maintain a difficult war. At last, in the year 44, the news ca,me, when 
 all were expecting Caesar in the East, that he was murdered. The schemes 
 of Herod's family seemed ruined. 
 
 Things, however, soon righted themselves. Antony began to play a 
 leading part in Rome, and had all the edicts of Cajsar confirmed, to pre- 
 vent hopeless confusion. Interest led Antipater for that time to join 
 Cassius, Cassar's murderer. Herod won favour as the first to i^ay him 
 the war tax of about £'150,000, levied on Galilee. Antipater showed equal 
 zeal ; but when the people were too j^oor to pay the enormous sum de- 
 manded, Cassius sold their sons and daughters as slaves, to make it up.
 
 PALESTINjE at the time op CHRIST. 23 
 
 Feeling Herod's usefulness, the republican leader, on leaving Judea 
 named him procurator of Coele- Syria, and gave him also military power 
 over all Judea, promising him the crown, if all went well. The Idumean 
 family were still on the top of the tide. But Antipater's course was run. 
 Shortly before the Feast of Tabernacles, in the year 43, he died of poison 
 given him in his wine. The murderer was well known — a follower of 
 Hyrcanus, Malichus by name — who wished to excite insurrection in the 
 Maccabcean's favour, against the Romans and their Idumean viceroy. 
 Herod and his brother, with well-acted craft, feigned friendliness with him, 
 till, a year later, they got him into their power, and murdered him, in 
 turn, with the help of Cassius. Hyrcanus kissed the hands of his new 
 master, and cursed the murdered man as the enemy of his country ! 
 
 The year 43 closed with wild troubles all over the land. The son of 
 Malichus on the south, and Antigonus on the north, invaded the land ; 
 but Herod overthrew them both. The weak Hyrcanus, who still dreaded 
 the house of Aristobulus, received the conqueror in Jerusalem, with 
 childish gratitude. Herod availed himself of this to ask Mariamne, 
 daughter of Alexander, whom Pompey had beheaded, and grand-daughter 
 of Hyrcanus himself, in marriage. He had already one wife, Dorig, who 
 had borne him a son, Antipater ; but she was now sent away, and went 
 off to bring up her son in deadly hatred of the Maccabtean family, who 
 had taken her young husband from her. 
 
 The hopes of the Jewish patriots revived once more after the battle of 
 Philipi^i, in the autumn of the year 42. It was left to Antony to pay the 
 soldiers, after the battle, what had been jDromised them ; and to raise the 
 vast sums required, by war taxes and the sale of titles, he moved towards 
 Asia. Here a deputation of Jews protesting against Herod and Phasael's 
 government -vv^aited on him ; but Herod had always been friendly to the 
 Romans, and was better provided with money than the people. Antony, 
 for his part, hated the Jews, and liked Herod, as the son of an old com- 
 rade, with whom, eighteen years before, he had fought against the very 
 people who now accused his son before him. Hyrcanus himself appeared 
 in Ephesus on behalf of the two brothers, and they themselves played 
 their part so well that they were not only confirmed in their ov>rn posi- 
 tions, but received substantial favours besides. 
 
 Antony v/as one of those undisciplined natures which revolutionary 
 times produce — a man of powerful but neglected parts, who had grown 
 up in the shattered and utterly imraoi'al Roman world ; unbridled in his 
 l^assions, and, amidst all the energy of his will, without moral restraint. 
 When in Egypt, as colonel of horse, he had for the first time seen Cleo- 
 patra, then fourteen years old, but already flirting with the son of 
 Pompey. In the years B.C. 46 to 44 she was living in Caesar's gardens at 
 Rome as that gi'eat man's mistress, and there Antony had been amongst 
 the most zealous in paying her honour. After Caesar's death he had 
 done her service, and tried to get her son Csesarion put on the list of 
 CiEsar's heirs. But, like Herod, she had been forced to go to war against 
 Antony, because the camp of Cassius was nearer than that of his op- 
 ponent. For this she was summoned before him, and made her appear-
 
 24 THE LII?E OF CHRIST. 
 
 ance at Tarsus, in Cilicia, in tlie summer of 41. She was now twenty- 
 eight, but still in the bloom of her beauty, and displayed her charms so 
 effectively that Antony was forthwith her slave. His worst deeds begin 
 from the time he met her. To please her he caused her sister to be 
 dragged out of a temple in Miletus and murdered, and he put to death all 
 she chose to denounce. She herself hastened to Egypt, whither Antony 
 panted to follow her. 
 
 In Antioch, in Syria, in the autumn of the same year, he would have 
 put to death a Jewish deputation sent to protest against the two brothers, 
 had not Herod prevented him. The two were, moreover, appointed 
 tetrarchs, with all formality. At Tyre, to which he had advanced, 
 thousands of Jews threw themselves in his way with loud, persistent, 
 fanatical cries that he should depose the brothers. Angry before, he was 
 now furious, and set his troops on them and hewed them down, killing 
 even the prisoners taken. He then moved on to spend the winter with 
 Cleopatra. 
 
 Throughout Judca and even in Egypt the deepest despondency reigned 
 among the Jews. The advent of the Messiah was to be preceded by times 
 of darkness and trouble, and so gloomy seemed the state of things then 
 prevailing that it appeared as if the long-expected One must be close at 
 hand. The belief or, at least, hope, found expression in the writings of 
 the day. The Jewish Sibylline Books, composed in Egypt in these j'ears, 
 predicted that " when Rome once rules over Egypt, then will the greatest 
 of the kingdoms, that of the Immortal King, appear among men, and a 
 Holy Lord shall come, who will rule all the countries of the earth through 
 all ages, as time flows on." 
 
 In Palestine there was great excitement. After their bloody inaugura- 
 tion into their office by Antony, the two tetrarchs, Phasael and Herod, 
 could count on few faithful subjects, and a new storm soon rose from the 
 East which threatened to destroy them. Since they had sold themselves 
 to the Romans, the exiled Maccaba3an prince had conspired more eagerly 
 with the Parthians, and had been supported in his appeal by Roman 
 exiles of the party of Tirutus and Cassius. The Parthians hesitated long, 
 but at last the rumour came that they were preparing for war. Jerusalem 
 trembled, for the Euphrates was undefended, and there were still gar- 
 risons of the republicans, which could not be trusted, all through Syria. 
 The action of Antony in such a crisis was impatiently awaited; but feast- 
 ing and pleasures reigned in Alexandria. The queen played at dice with 
 the Triumvir; drank and hunted with him ; wandered through the streets 
 by night with him, playing rough tricks ; she, dressed as a servant-woman, 
 he, as a servant-man. She let him escape her neither by night nor day. 
 Her extravagance was unparalleled ; at a dinner she drank crushed pearls, 
 that the cost of a meal might come to a million sestertii, as she liad 
 wagered it would. There was no end of her light follies, to amuse him ; 
 she had foreign pickled fish hung by divers on his hooks as he fished, and 
 induced the senator Plancus to dance as Glaucus, naked, at one of her 
 banquets, painted blue, his head wreathed with sea-weed, and waving a 
 tail behind him, as he went gliding on all fours. The costliest meals were
 
 PALESTINE AT THE TIME 01^^ CHRIST. 25 
 
 ftfc all times ready in the castle, foi' the cook never knew when they would 
 need to be served up. 
 
 Sunk in this sensual indulgence, Antony left it to the proconsul of 
 Syria to defend that province, till forced, in the spring of the year 40, to 
 go to Greece, to manage a war which his wife had stirred up, to draw him 
 aAvay from Cleoi^atra. Meanwhile, Asia Minor Avas overrun by the Par- 
 thians, and Phasael and Herod saw themselves exposed to an early inroad, 
 against which they were helpless. 
 
 And now, to use the fine figure of Hausrath, there rose again before 
 Hj-rcanus, as if from some long-disused church3ard, the ghost of that 
 dynastic question which for thirty years had haunted the palace, and 
 could not be laid. His nephew Antigoniis came from Chalcis, where he 
 had been living with a relative, and obtained help from the Parthian 
 leader, on the promise of giving him 1,000 talents and 500 wives, if he 
 were restored to the throne. At Carmel, Antigonus was greeted with 
 shouts, as king, and he liastencd on to Jerusalem, where part of the people 
 joined him. The tetrarchs succeeded in driving him and his adherents 
 into the Temple, and shutting them up in it : but daily fights took place 
 in the streets, and, as Pentecost was near, and crowds of armed and half- 
 armed pilgrims arrived in the city, the brothers were, in their turn, shut 
 up in their palace, from which, however, their soldiers made constant 
 sallies, butchering the crowds like sheep. At last the cup-bearer of the 
 Parthian prince came to the gate with 600 cavalry, asking entrance as a 
 mediator between the factions, and was admitted by Phasael, who was 
 even weak enough to let himself be persuaded to set out for the Parthian 
 head-quarters, taking Hyrcanus with him, to conclude arrangements for 
 peace. At Ptolcmais they found themselves prisoners, and were soon after 
 fettered and put in confinement. Herod, meanwhile, had refused to listen 
 to similar treacherous invitations, and having mounted his family on 
 mules by night, set off with them, in the darkness, towards the strong 
 fortress Masada, on the Dead Sea, Avlicre his brother Joseph had command, 
 reaching it only after terrible fighting in the passes of the hills. Leaving 
 his women behind in safety, and taking his men with him, he now fled 
 towards Edom; biit as he had no money, the sheikhs of Mount Seir refused 
 to receive him. 
 
 In the meantime the Parthians had thrown off the mask in Jerusalem, 
 had plundered the city, and were sweeping like a devouring fire through the 
 land, proclaiming Antigonus everywhere as king. In the camp, Hyrcanus 
 was the first to do homage to the new sovereign, but Antigonus flew at 
 him, and with his oavu teeth bit off his ears, to vinfit him for ever for the 
 high priesthood, and then sent him beyond the Euphrates as a prisoner. 
 Phasael escaped further insult Ijy a voluntary death. Deprived of 
 weapons, he beat out his brains against the walls of his dungeon. Anti- 
 gonus now assumed the name of Mattathias, from the founder of the 
 Maccabsean family, — and the titles of high piiest and king. But his 
 position was insecure, for Masada still held out, and was defended by 
 Joseph, Herod's brother, for two years, till Herod relieved it. The bar- 
 barities of the Parthians, moreover, undermined his authority. On their
 
 26 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 small horses of the steppes tliey scoured the country in troops, mangling 
 the men, maltreating the women, burning down whole towns, and tor- 
 turing even the defenceless. No wonder that, though a Parthian never 
 watered his horse in the Jordan after the year B.C. 38, the memory of 
 these mounted hordes lingered in the minds of the people, so that even 
 St. John introduces them in the Apocalypse, as a symbol of the plagues 
 of the final judgment, which were to destroy a third part of men. 
 
 Herod, repelled from Idumea, fled to Egypt, which Antony had left at 
 the beginning of the year 40. Cleopatra, however, gave him a friendly 
 and even distinguished welcome, thinking she could win him over to her 
 service, and use him as general against the Parthians. But Herod had 
 higher aims. Braving the danger of autumn storms, he set sail for Home, 
 was shipwrecked off Rhodes, built a new trireme with borrowed money, 
 reached Italy soon after, and on getting to Rome found there both 
 Octavian and Antony. Before them he had his cause pleaded so skilfully 
 that the Senate unanimously appointed him King of Judea, and he was 
 formally installed in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, with the usual 
 heathen sacrifices. Seven days later he was on his way back to Palestine, 
 and the cause of Antigonus was doomed. This new dignity, however, 
 carried in its bosom the seeds of all Herod's future misery. Hyrcanus, 
 though disqualified for being high priest, could yet be ethnarch, and his 
 grand-child Aristobulus, brother to Mariamne, Herod's betrothed, was 
 alive. Plerod's kingship was a wrongful usurpation of the rights of 
 both. 
 
 Meanwhile, the position of Antigonus was getting desp'erate. The 
 cruelties of the Parthians, the failure to take Masada, and a fresh out- 
 break on a great scale, in Galilee and on the Lake of Gennesareth, of zeal 
 against the heathen oppressors of the land,had turned the Rabbis and the 
 Sanhedrim, hitherto his supporters, against him. Nor were the peojile 
 more friendly. As he left the Temple on the Day of Atonement, accom- 
 panied by a crowd, to conduct him to his palace, the multitude turned 
 away to follow two Rabbis who chanced to pass. Yet Herod was still, in 
 the eyes of the nation, only "the servant of the Asmoneans." 
 
 Herod began the war against Antigoniis with the assui-ance of Roman 
 help, but Silo, the Roman general, let himself be bribed by Antigonus, 
 and Herod had to struggle single-handed. The Romans only plundered 
 Jericho, and quartered themselves idly on the nation at large. Herod 
 had to turn against the zealots of Galilee, since he could get no help 
 towards more serious efforts ; and he soon extirpated them. The Par- 
 thians, however, by this time had been driven out of Asia Minor and 
 Syria, and finally crushed, in a great battle on the Euphrates. Two new 
 legions were now free to aid Herod, but their general, like Silo, cared 
 only for making monej^ and, like him, took a bribe from Antigonus. In 
 the meantime, Joseph, Herod's brother, fell in battle, and this roused 
 Herod, who was always faithful to his family, to fury. With only a non- 
 descript army he burst on Galilee and Judea, and drove the Maccabajans 
 before him like chaff. Except Jerusalem, the whole land was now his, 
 and he set himself to the task of taking the capital. For two years, with
 
 THE EEIGN OF HEROD. 27 
 
 only raw recruit.s who knew nothing, veterans who had forgotten every- 
 thing, Itureans who took his pay and did as little as possible for it, and 
 treacherous allies, he had fought against a fanatical people, who turned 
 every hamlet and cavern into a fortress. It needed a genius and a super- 
 human energy like his to triumph in such a war. In the early spring of 
 37 B.C. he proceeded to invest Jerusalem, but thought it politic, before the 
 siege actually began, to go to Samaria and marry Mariamne, the grand- 
 daughter of Ilyrcanus, his rival and enemy. The Samaritans, in their 
 hatred of the JMaccaba^an dynastj-, had Ijccn Herod's devoted supporters 
 in the war ; and he had honoured their loyalty by placing his bride, and 
 the rest of his family, in their keeping, at Samaria, when it first broke 
 out. He was no sooner married than the work of blood once more began. 
 Jerusalem was besieged by his army of Samaritans, friendly Jews, wild 
 Idumeans, and mercenaries from Phcnicia and Lebanon, and fell on the 
 10th of June, after a fierce struggle, which Avas followed by wild pillage and 
 slaughter. Antigonus was taken prisoner, and was put to death by the 
 Eoman general, at Herod's entreat}-, after he had suffered the outrage, 
 hitherto unknown towards a prince, of being scourged like a slave. Thus 
 another Asmonean was out of the way. The family had reigned 126 
 years. Herod was now really king. A great bribe to the Roman army 
 freed the country of the burden of the Roman support, and the misery of 
 its lawlessness. A bloody proscription, after the pattern of that of the 
 Eoman triumvirate, mowed down all enemies within the city, the gates of 
 which were closed till the executions were ended. In the midst of this, 
 Antony, once more beside Cleopatra, in Egypt, and needing endless wealth 
 for their mutual prodigalities, sent a demand to all the kingdoms he con- 
 trolled, — Judea amongst others, — for a vast sum of money. Herod had 
 only an empty treasury ; a country strewn with ruins and smoking heaps ; 
 and, moreover, it Avas the Sabbath year, in which the laws made by Ctesar 
 prohibited the levying any tax. The proscription had therefore to be 
 made a means of raising funds, as had been done by Octavian and Antony, 
 at Rome. Forty-five of his richest opponents were put to death, and their 
 property confiscated so ruthlessly, that even their coffins were searched at 
 the city gates for jewels or money. Many were glad to escape death by 
 giving up all they had. " The oppression and tyranny had no limit," says 
 Josephus. Herod, however, was none the richer, for he had to send off 
 the whole crown treasures of the Asmoneaus to Laodicea, to help to make 
 up the amount demanded from him. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE EEIGN OF HEROD. 
 
 T 
 
 HE position of Herod was difficult in the extreme. He had everything 
 to reorganize. Galilee lay exhausted by brigandage, entire towns 
 were unpeopled, as Lydda, Thamna, Goplina, and Emmaus, whose inhabi- 
 tants had been sold by Cassius as slaves. Jericho had been taken and
 
 28 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 plundered once and again : five towns round it lay in rubbish and asbes ; 
 Marissa had been burned down by the Parthians ; and in the midst of all, 
 the l)leeding land had to be harried afresh, to satisfy Cleopatra and her 
 slave, Antony. But the genius of Herod erelong built up a strong govern- 
 ment out of this chaos, surrounding himself with his old friends, and 
 ruthlessly crushing his enemies. Filling posts, where needful or desirable, 
 with foreigners of any nation, he yet strove to keep on a good footing 
 with the Eabbis and the Pharisee pai*ty at large, but gradually took from 
 their Sanhedrim and schools the legal and civil powers they had exercised, 
 leaving tliem the control only of municipal and ecclesiastical details. A 
 high priest was appointed, such as the times seemed to demand. !N"o 
 native could be trusted ; Hyrcanus, avIio still survived in Bal:)ylon, was 
 disqualified ; Aristobulus, the king's brother-in-law, was too young, and 
 Herod was a born Idumean. A Eabbi from Babylon was therefore selected 
 as likely to give no trouble, but the rule was introduced, as an extra pre- 
 caution, that the office should, henceforth, be held, by any one, only for a 
 short time. Hyrcanus was Aviled from the East that Herod might have 
 him in his own power, and prevent his being played o£E against him in case 
 of another Parthian war. 
 
 But Herod's position was a fatal one. "Willing to treat his subjects well, 
 Rome, to whom he owed his crown, forced him to oppress them. He 
 wished to reign as a Jew, but he had made a thank-offering in the temple 
 of Jupiter Capitoliuus for the crown. He knew that he could be popular 
 only by observing the Law, but his being king at all was illegal. He 
 flattered the Rabbis, but they were his deadliest enemies. Yet all this 
 was little to the troubles which his ambition had prepared for him in his 
 own household. Had he founded an entirely new dynasty, his relations 
 would have been on his side, and he could have relied on a party. But he 
 had been unwise enough to marry into the family he had overthrown, in 
 the hope of gaining a colour of legitimacy for his reign ; and in doing so 
 he had at once failed to appease the injured, and had brought his mortal 
 enemies round him, as his relations. The marriage with Mariamne, by 
 which he hoped to strengthen his title, carried with it his keenest indict- 
 ment. In Aristobulus, his brother-in-law, he saw only a rival, and he 
 betook himself to the usual remedy of tyrants — murder — to make himself 
 safe. But this only made his position so much the worse, for his best- 
 loved wife knew that he had murdered her brother, and their very children 
 had more right to the throne than himself. His suspicions were thiis 
 roused at his every step, in his own palace, and could only be appeased by 
 fiesh crimes. He raged against his own flesh and blood, and made him- 
 self wretched as a man, to be secure as a king. 
 
 Towards the close of the year a great disaster befell the Triumvir, 
 Antony. His troops, deserted by their barbarous allies, had to retreat 
 from Media, mai'ching for twenty-seven days through a wasted country^ 
 pursued by the Parthians, and often in want of food or water. Twenty 
 thousand foot, and four thousand horse, perished, and all the army train 
 was lost, l)efore he reached the Araxes, on the Caspian Sea, and eight 
 thousand more died before he got to Sidon on the sea-coast. Here he
 
 THE KEIGN OF HEROD. 29 
 
 waited for Cleopatra, who was alarmed at hearing that his wife Octavia 
 was coming to meet him, and, pretending that she would die if he de- 
 serted her, so unmanned him that he left his army to his officers and went 
 off with her to Egj'i^t. He was now entirely in her hands, and the 
 neighbouring powers soon felt the results. 
 
 Alexandra, the mother of Mariamue and Aristobulus, was sorely aggrieved 
 that her son should not have been made high priest, as was his right, and 
 plotted with a crafty officer of Antony's suite, then at Jerusalem, to get 
 Antony to help her in the matter. He asked and got the portraits of 
 both brother and sister to send to his master, but it was with the design 
 of getting Antony enamoured of Mariamne and of thus raising a rival to 
 Cleopatra, and his scheme succeeded. Antony fell in love with the Jewish 
 queen, and was only kept from acting on his passion by his fear of the 
 jealousy of his Egyptian mistress. He confined himself for the time to 
 asking Herod to send the boy to him. 
 
 Herod was alarmed, and induced Antony to withdraw his request, which 
 he said would lead to a revolt if granted : but seeing how things stood, 
 he deposed the high priest and appointed Aristobulus, then seventeen, in 
 his place. Unfortunately for the lad, the Jews hailed his elevation with 
 delight. The result was, that Herod, soon after, got him held under the 
 water in a bath, at Jericho, till he was drowned, and pretended it was an 
 accident. 
 
 Alexandra and Mariamne, knowing the truth, thii'sted for revenge, and 
 plotted with Cleopatra to obtain it. She on her part was anxious to get 
 hold of Judea, and only used the plotters for this end. Herod was sum- 
 moned before Antony, but he ordered, before he left, that should he not 
 return, Alexandra should be put to death as a punishment, and Mariamne 
 also killed, to prevent her falling into the hands of Antony. Unfortunately 
 for all, this was told them in his absence, and Mariamne, roused to frenzy, 
 greeted him, on his coming back, with an outburst of the long pent-up 
 hatred she felt at his crimes. Alexandra was forthwith thrown into 
 chains ; his sister Salome's husband, who had betrayed the secret, was 
 put to death ; Mariamne, whom he passionately loved, was spared a little 
 longer. 
 
 Other ti'oubles, from outside, now, for a time, thrust the domestic 
 miseries into the background. Herod had discovered Cleopatra's designs, 
 which were to get all the countiy, from Egypt to Syria, for herself. 
 Antony was to be persuaded on one pretext or other, to dethrone the 
 different rulers. She did actually get him to put Lysanias, the ruler of 
 the Lebanon district, to death, on pretence of his being in league with the 
 Parthians, and got his principality, which she presently farmed out. 
 Herod was now between her possessions, on both north and south, and 
 feared lest her influence with Antony might be his ruin. 
 
 She next begged and got part of the Nabattean kingdom : then the 
 whole sea-coast of Palestine from the river Eleutherus to Egypt — Tyre 
 and Sidon excepted — and, finally, Herod had to give up to her the Oasis 
 of Jericho with its balsam ])lantations — the richest part of his kingdom. 
 The summons to Laodicea and the taking away of Jericho seemed to show
 
 30 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 tliat Herod's influence with Antony was shaken, and opposition con- 
 sequently raised itself once more. Plots were again rife on every side, 
 at home and abroad. Cleopatra was his constant terror, for at any moment 
 she might spring some new mine under his feet. Even the Maccab^ana 
 were once more raising their heads. The Eabbis, whose schools had 
 flourished immensely since their exclusion from politics, began to interfere 
 with them again. Hillel and Shammai were, respectively, the heads 
 of the more liberal and the harsher parties. But Herod was too much 
 occupied by great affairs to trouble himself about them. 
 
 Things were I'apidly coming to a crisis in the Eoman Emj^ire. The 
 object of the Egyptian queen in lavishing her blandishments on Antony 
 became more and more apparent. She had entangled him in her snares 
 only to serve herself, and the great Samson laid his head unsuspiciously 
 on her Delilah lap. She di-eamed of bringing the whole Eastern empire 
 of Rome, through him, under Egyptian rule, and of becoming the empress 
 of half the world ; and it seemed as if he were willing it should be so. 
 He gave mortal offence at Rome by celebrating his triumphs, not there, 
 but at Alexandria. He gave Cleopatra the title of the " queen of kings." 
 Pheir two sons, Ptolemy and Alexander, were to be " kings of kings." 
 He gave Syria, Phenicia, and Cilicia to the former, and Armenia and 
 Media, with Parthia, as soon as it should be overcome, to the latter ; 
 while to their daughter, the young Cleopatra, he handed over Cyrenaika. 
 Cleopatra herself was made Queen of Egypt, Cyprus, Libya, and Coele- 
 Syria, her son Cassarion sharing them with her. After the example of the 
 Pharaohs and Ptolemies, both she and Antony assumed divine honours — 
 Cleopatra as Isis, he as Osiris — and their statues were set up in sacred 
 places. Public feeling at Rome was outraged and alarmed. The popular 
 poets sent verses afloat in which Antony sought to make the Jupiter of 
 Rome give way to the barking, dog-headed Anubis, threatened the galleys 
 of Rome with being outsailed by the boats of the Nile, and would fain 
 frighten the trumpets of Rome with the clattering sistrum. Csesar laid 
 the facts before the Senate, and Antony, in return, made charges against 
 Cffisar. War— long inevitable — at last broke out, and was decided in the 
 sea-fight at Actium. Cleopat>ra had persuaded her dupe to fight on the 
 water rather than on land, that she might flee to Egypt at the first signs 
 of defeat, and she did this in the midst of the battle, when victory was 
 yet entirely douljtful. Ever his ruin, she thus completed her fatal 
 triumph, for the weak man, as if he could not live without her, forthwith 
 deserted his forces, though his ships were still fighting stoutly, and he 
 had 100,000 foot, and 12,000 horse, on the sea-shore, who had never fought 
 at all. It was noticed that on the day of Actium a terrible earthquake 
 took place in Palestine, killing 10,000 persons and endless cattle. Herod, 
 seeing Antony fallen, forthwith made peace with Cossar. Fresh plots of 
 Alexandra had been discovered, in which Hyrcanus, now eighty j'ears old, 
 was to be played off against him ; but they only led to the revolting sight 
 of the last of the Maccabffians, in extreme old age, being beheaded by his 
 son-in-law. Herod's hands were getting redder and redder with the 
 blood of his kindred. With Cassar he managed things well, entertaining
 
 THE REIGN OF HEKOD. 31 
 
 him royally on his way through Palestine to Egypt, and providing supplies 
 for his army on their march, with equal wisdom and munificence. Mean- 
 while Antony and Cleopatra spent their last days in feasting and revelry, 
 varied with ghastly trials, before them, of every known poison, by turns, 
 on different prisoners, to see which caused the easiest death. In the 
 autumn of 30 B.C. Antony stabbed himself mortally, and Cleopatra soon 
 after ended her life by poison, leaving Herod to breathe freely for the 
 first time in long years. Octavian took him into favour, for he needed 
 such a man as a protection on the eastern borders, to defend them against 
 the Parthians. Jericho was given back, Samaria was incorporated with 
 his kingdom, with various coast towns, and some territory beyond the 
 Jordan. Cleopatra's body-guard of 400 Gauls was presented to him by 
 Octavian. But if he had honour and rewards, it was at the cost of an 
 expenditure, to do honour and homage to his imperial master, that seemed 
 to have overstrained his resources. 
 
 Once more safe from dangers tliat might well have overwhelmed him, 
 Herod found, on his return from attendance on Octavian, such troubles at 
 home as darkened his whole future life. The quarrels of his seraglio had 
 come to a head. Alexandra and her daughter Mariamne were now the 
 only two left of the old royal race, and were so much the more hated 
 by the kindred of Herod. Mariatnne — tall and noble in person — had the 
 pride of a daughter of kings, and let Salome, Herod's sister, feel it. In 
 Herod's absence she discovered that, for the second time, he had left 
 orders to kill her and her mother if he did not return ; and she showed 
 what she thought of this when he did come back, by receiving him with 
 undisguised aversion. Her enemies took advantage of this to fan Herod's 
 anger by every scandal they could invent against her, till, in the end, he 
 believed she had been unfaithful, and the fair queen, deserted and betrayed 
 by all, was handed over to the headsman. Herod's remorse, when she had 
 thus actually perished, was awful. He lost his reason for a time, would 
 call for her, lament over her, kept his servants calling her as if she were 
 still alive, gave up all business, and fled to Samaria, whore he had married 
 her, to seek relief from his thoughts in hunting. At last he fell into 
 violent illness, and lay seemingly hopeless. Alexandra, furious at her 
 daughter's murder, thought this the right moment to attempt to set 
 Mariamne's two sons on the throne, which was theirs by right, more than 
 their father's. A plague had broken out, and this the Eabbis construed 
 into divine vengeance for the cjueen's death. Tiie news roused the tyi-ant, 
 ill as he was. Alexandra was instantly put to death, and many others 
 shared her fate ; but already a new suspicion had risen to torment the 
 wretched man. Alexandra's proclamation of his sons as the rightful 
 heirs had made them, also, his fancied enemies. Among the people the 
 memory of Mariamne was sacred, and their hopes were set on her sons. 
 
 Octavian was now sole ruler of the Roman world, under the high name 
 of Augustus, and an era o£ restoration and refinement took the place of 
 destruction and tumult. "With the widespread peace, trade revived, and 
 prosperity returned to Judea among other countries, The patronage of 
 literature and art, the construction of public works, and the rebuilding
 
 q 
 
 2 THE LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 and beautifying of Rome and the cities and towns of the provinces, were 
 now the fashion, set by Augustus, and shxvishly followed by vassal kings. 
 In imitation of him, Herod patronized men whose writings could shed a 
 lustre on his court — notably the two brothers, Nicolaus and Ptolemy, of 
 Damascus, both able and faithful puljlic servants. Nicolaus was a 
 voluminous and skilful author as well. Other Greeks and half-Greeks 
 were jDut in offices of trust or honour, as members of the government, or 
 ambassadors, or as tutors and travelling companions to his sons. Most 
 of them served Herod honourably to the last, but thei^e were not wanting 
 some of the Greek sycophants Avho at that time infested all courts, and 
 one of the worst of these, Eurykles the Lacedtemonian, who amassed 
 wealth by espionage and false witnesses, was destined to be the bad 
 genius of Herod's later years. The biting wit of the Rabbis spoke of 
 the whole heathen government of the court as " the proselytes of the 
 king's table." 
 
 A shrewd and able man like Herod, whose leading thought was to 
 flatter and serve Augustus, so as to secure his permanent favour, was of 
 great use in a disturbed border country, to one who, like Augustus, was 
 as much disinclined as unqualified for war. When, therefore, Herod 
 determined in the year B.C. 23 to send Mariamne's two sons to Rome, 
 Csesar received them with every honour, and gave the lads every facility 
 for growing up iu the midst of high Roman life. But they little knew 
 in how dark a gloom all this early sialendour would set ! By a curious 
 coincidence it was their tutor's son, with whom they rose to manhood, 
 whom Yirgil liad flattered as an infant by applying to him, in the fourth 
 Eclogue, the Messianic hope of the Jews. Of this " Messiah " of Virgil 
 they were now the youthful friends. Herod himself took his sons to 
 Rome, and was honoured by a gift from Augustus of the district of 
 Lebanon, and of the lawless territories of Iturea and Trachonitis, with 
 the fertile plains of the Hauran. The former swarmed with robbers, like 
 Galilee in Herod's youth, and the two latter were filled with wild clans of 
 borderers, who were the terror of the land at large. But on his return, 
 Herod soon reduced them so thoroughly that they were peaceful even 
 under his successors. A year after, Herod could personally report his 
 success to Csesar's minister Agrippa, at Mitylene, to which he went to 
 meet him. Two years later Herod received from Augustus, in person, at 
 Antioch, the districts of Ulatha and Panias, to round off his kingdom 
 suitably. He now reigned over a larger kingdom than any iireceding 
 Jewish monarch. The glory of David seemed to be outshone. From 
 Lebanon to the far south, and from the edge of the Desert to the sea- 
 coast, was Jewish territory. Nor was the political glory granted to 
 Herod less than the material. He was made the representative of 
 Agrippa in the East, and it was required that his counsel should be taken, 
 before anything of moment was done by consuls or governors. Amidst 
 these flatteries from Augustus it was necessary to do something to 
 conciliate the Jews. Hence, in the year 24 Herod had married a Jewish 
 maiden— Mariamnc, daughter of Boethos, a priest of Alexandrian origin 
 who was raised to the high priesthood, to dignify the alliance with " the
 
 THE REIGN OF HE ROD. 33 
 
 fairest woman in tlie world " — Jesus, tlie son of PLabi, the high priest at 
 the time, being set aside in his favour. Bocithos was a great accession to 
 the small body of the Sadducean dignitaries, but, in politics, was, of 
 course, a Herodian. 
 
 So much intercourse with heathenism, however, and the splendid 
 flatteries by which Herod sought to retain and increase the power of his 
 master, were not without their effects on Judaism. Even in the days of 
 the Syrian kings, Palestine had been encircled by Greek towns and cities, 
 and the immigration of heathen settlers had, in Herod's day, made the 
 towns of the Philistine coast and of the Decapolis much more Greek than 
 Jewish. The only bounds to Herod's introduction of foreign novelties 
 were his dread of national opposition. Greek had become the court 
 dialect of the Empire— as French was that of Europe in the days of 
 Louis XIV., and still remains to a great extent, — and hence it was 
 universally favoured and spoken by the upper classes in Herod's 
 dominions. Samaria received a Greek name, had Greek coins, and Greek 
 idolatry. The first act of Herod, after Augustus had aggrandised him so 
 greatly, was to build a temple of white marble to his patron, at Panias, 
 the future CiBsarea Philippi, lying finely on one of the southern spurs of 
 Lebanon. Before long, venturing to bring heathenism nearer the centre 
 of the land, he built another temple to Caesar in Samaria, and surrounded 
 it by a consecrated approach, a furlong and a half in circumference. A 
 grand palace was also begun in Jerusalem itself, in the heathen style, 
 with wide porticoes, rows of pillars, and baths ; its one wing receiving 
 the name of Caesar, the other that of Agrippa. Herodium, which he 
 built on the hill, at the mouth of the deep gorge leading to the Dead Sea, 
 where he had so bravely defended himself against the Parthians, was 
 planned as a Eoman castle, rising over an Italian town, with public 
 buildings and stately aqueducts. His grandest undertaking, after the 
 Temple, was the creation of Ca:!sarea, on the coast. The name was 
 another flattery of the Emperor ; *.hat of one of the great signal towers 
 on the smaller harbour was Drusion, after Caasar's son. The great pier 
 was adorned with splendid pillars. Broad quays, magnificent bazaars, 
 spacious basilicas, for the courts of law and other public uses, and huge 
 sailors'-homes, invited a great commerce ; and on an eminence above rose 
 a temple, with a colossal statue, visible far out at sea, of Augustus, as 
 Jupiter Olympus, and another of Eome, deified as Juno. Theatres and 
 amphitheatres were not wanting. A grand palace, designed for 
 Herod himself, became later the PrEetorium of the Roman procurators. 
 Temples to Jupiter, Neptune, Apollo, Hercules, Bacchus, Minerva, 
 Victory, and Astarte, soon adorned the town, and showed the many- 
 coloured heathenism of its population. It was, moreover, provided with 
 a system of magnificent underground sewers in the Roman manner? 
 Cajsarea was in every respect a foreign city. Its population was more 
 heathens than Jewish, and their mutual hatred often led to fierce riots. 
 
 In Jerusalem itself a theatre and amphitheatre were erected. Countless 
 foreign proselytes and numerous heathens had settled in the city. The 
 coins bore Greek inscriptions. Among the troops of Herod were 
 
 D
 
 34 THE LIFE OP CHEIST. 
 
 Thracian, German, and Gallic regiments. So thoroughly, indeed, had 
 foreign elements gained a footing, even in the fanatical capital, in spite of 
 the Eabbis, that, while the people at large retained their native dialect, 
 many Greek words had been permanently incorporated with it. The very 
 Temple disjilayed proofs of the irrepressible influences of the great world 
 outside Judea. Its outer court was thronged by heathens, and countless 
 gifts presented by heathen princes and nobles adorned the walls of the 
 court of the priests. The Ptolemies had enriched it by numerous costly 
 gifts. Sosius, when he took Jerusalem, in concert with Herod, vowed a 
 golden crown. Among the Temple vessels were wine jars which had been 
 presented by Augustus and his Empress. It was, indeed, a common 
 thing for Eomans to make gifts of this kind. They very often, also, 
 presented offerings. When Pompey had taken Jerusalem, his first care 
 was to provide the usual sacrifices. Agrippa, the friend and patron of 
 Herod, offered a hecatomb on his visit to Jerusalem fifteen years before 
 Christ, and Augustus provided that sacrifices should be offered daily at 
 his expense to the Most High God ; an example which must have had 
 countless followers. All the hatred between Jews and heathen Vv^as not 
 strong enough to prevent the Temple becoming, like all the famous 
 sanctuaries of the age, a gathering point for the world at large. 
 
 There was, clearly, much to keep a fanatical people in a constant ten- 
 sion, and to make them more fanatical still. Heathen temples, with their 
 attendant priests, pompous ritual, and imposing sacrifices, abounded in 
 the land. Gaza, in the south, was virtually a Greek city, and worshipped 
 a local Jupiter as the town god, " who sent rain and fruitfulness on the 
 earth," and associated with him, in its idolatry, another Jupiter — the 
 Victory Bringer — Apollo, the Sun, and Hercules, and the goddesses 
 Fortune, lo, Diana, Juno, and Venus. Ascalon worshipped Jupiter, 
 IsTeptune, Apollo, the Sun, Minerva, Mercury, Castor and Pollux, and the 
 Sja-ian Moon goddess Astarte, as the heavenly Venus — the warlike, spear- 
 bearing, Queen of Heaven. On the rocks at Joppa, the marks of the 
 chains were shown which had been forged for Andi'omeda. A laurel- 
 crowned Jupiter was worshipped at Dora, north of Ccesarea. At Ptolemais 
 the favourite divinity was the goddess Fortune, but with her, Jupiter, 
 Apollo, Diana, Venus, Pluto and Persephone, and Perseus, with the 
 Egyptian Serapis, and the Phrygian Cj^bele, had their respective wor- 
 shippers. 
 
 In Tyre, the old worship of Baal and Astarte — the Sun and Moon — • 
 retained their pre-eminence, with a Greek colouring of the idolatry. In 
 Damascus Greek heathenism was in the ascendant. Jupiter, Hercules, 
 and Bacchus, Diana, Minerva, and Victory had their temples, and were 
 stamped on the local coins. In the future province of Philip heathenism 
 was predominant. In Panias or Cfesarea Philippi, as we have seen, Herod 
 built a temple for the worship of Augustus, but the leading divinity was 
 the god Pan, as the old name of the town — Panias — indicates; Jupiter, 
 however, and Astarte, with a horn of plenty, Apollo, and Diana, had also 
 their votaries, and no doubt their temples. Heathenism flourished in 
 Batanasa, Trachonitis, and Auranitis. Helios, the Sun, was the great
 
 THE EEIGN OF HEEOD. 35 
 
 object of worship, and so deep-rooted was this idolatry that the early 
 Christian missionaries knew no other Avay of overthrowing it than by 
 changing it into the name of the prophet Elias, and turning the temples 
 into churches dedicated to him. Round this central divinity, however, 
 the worship of Bacchus, Saturn, Hercules, Minerva, Fortune, Yenus, 
 Victory, Peace, and other divinities flourished more or less. The cities of 
 the Decapolis were very heathen. 
 
 Thus, all round the central district of Palestine, and to some extent 
 even within its limits, heathenism had already in Herod's day, and, con- 
 sequently, in Christ's, its temples, altars, idols, and priests. Jehovah was 
 no longer the sole God. With a few exceptions, of Syrian or Egyptian 
 divinities, Greek names and rites mai-ked the source of the corruption, 
 though v/e have given the Roman names as better known. Of all this 
 aggressive heathenism Herod, so far as he dared, was the ostentatious 
 patron. If he could hardly venture on much within the narrow limits of 
 Jndea, cenotaphs, mausolca, and other monuments offensive to a Jew were 
 seen along all the leading roads, and so many places were called by new 
 Latin names, in honour of the imperial family, that a traveller might think 
 he was in Italy. Nor was the King ever without money to bestow on 
 neighbouring heathen cities, as a mark of friendliness, in building gym- 
 nasia, piazzas, theatres, and aqueducts, or in the shape of prizes to be 
 striven for in the circus. It seemed as if the throne of David existed only 
 to spread heathenism. It was clear to the Jews that Herod's heathen 
 subjects were nearest his heart, since, a,midst all his lavish munificence 
 to them, he had done nothing to beautify a single Jewish town except 
 Jerusalem, to which his additions were, themselves, heathen. The most 
 appalling reports respecting him spread from month to mouth. He had 
 preserved the body of Mariamne for seven years in honey for the most 
 hideous ends : he had strangled all the great Rabbis, except Baba-ben- 
 Buta, and him he had blinded. The most intense hatred of him prevailed. 
 
 It was Vv'ith the estremest mistrust, therefore, that the Rabbis heard 
 in the year B.C. 20 that Herod intended replacing the humble temple of 
 the Exile by one unspeakably more splendid. It is said that Baba-ben- 
 Buta had seen a crack in the old structure, and counselled Herod to build 
 another in its place, as an expiation for the murder of Mariamne and the 
 Rabbis, and to conciliate the people for his favour to heathenism. The 
 proi^hecies were played off by him, to win popular sanction to his under- 
 taking, for Haggai had foretold that a new temple of surpassing glory 
 would one day be built. But so great was the distrust, that all the 
 materials of the new temple needed to be brought together before a stone 
 of the old one could be touched. At last, on the regnal day of Herod, in 
 the year B.C. 14, the unfinished structure was conseci-ated, and the lowing 
 of 300 oxen at the Great Altar announced to Jerusalem that the first 
 sacrifice in it was about to be offered. Bnt scarcely was the consecration 
 over, than national gratitvide was turned into indignation by his setting up 
 a huge golden eagle — the emblem of heathen Rome — over the great gate, 
 in expectation of a visit from distinguished strangers from the imperial 
 city. The nation was not duped as the king had expected. ■ In spite of
 
 36 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 his having begun a temple so magnificent that even a Jewish saying owns 
 that he who had not seen it had seen nothing worth looking at, an abyss 
 yawned between him and them. He had burned the registers of Jeru- 
 salem to destroy the pedigrees of which the people boasted : he had tried 
 to make it be believed that he was the descendant of a foreign Jewish 
 family, but no one regarded him as anything but the slave of their kings. 
 All felt that his conduct was as little Jewish as his birth ; and that he 
 was rather a Eoman proconsul than the King of Israel. Even the worst 
 of the Maceabfean house were bound to the national faith by the functions 
 of the pontificate, but though Herod might be made King of Judca by the 
 favour of Rome, no earthly power could make him a descendant of Aaron, 
 without being which he could not be high priest. 
 
 In vain Herod tried to make himself beloved. He had done much to 
 deserve gratitude in these later years, and yet the nation wrote his 
 virtues in water, and his faults in brass. A dreadful famine, followed by 
 pestilence, had spread misery and death in the thirteenth year of his 
 reign. No rain had fallen at the required times, and the crops utterly 
 failed, so that there was no food for either man or Ijcast. Men said it was 
 a judgment of God for the defilement of His land by their king's crinies 
 and heathen innovations, for Mariamne's blood, now four years shed, still 
 seemed to cry for vengeance, and, since her murder, a theatre and circus 
 had profaned Jerusalem, while heathen games, in which men fought with 
 men, to the death, had been set on foot with great pomp. Samaria, the 
 hated rival of Jerusalem, was even then, moreover, being rebuilt, with a 
 heathen temple in it, in which a man— Augustus — was to be worshipped. 
 Herod felt the peril of his position, and acted, from policy, as others might 
 have done from the wisest and most energetic philanthropy. Selling the 
 very plate in his palace, and emptying his treasury, he sent funds to 
 Egypt and bought corn, which he brought home and distributed, as a gift, 
 among all the people, for their money had been spent for the merest 
 necessaries before this I'elief came. He even provided clothing for the 
 nation in the winter, where it was wanted, for sheep and goats alike had 
 been killed for food, and he supplied seed corn for next spring, and thus 
 the evil time was tided over. For a while it seemed as if the people 
 would really become loyal. But his best acts of one moment were spoiled 
 the next. The bazaars and schools muttered ti-eason continually. One 
 year Herod remitted a third of the taxes, but tongues went against him 
 none the less, and presently he seemed to justify their bitterness by 
 decreeing that all thieves should be sold as slaves to other countries, 
 where, as the people said, they would lose the blessing of Abraham , could 
 not keep the Law, and would be lost for ever. Meanwhile Agrippf* 7isited 
 Jerusalem again, and bore himself so wisely that thousands escorted him 
 to the sea-coast when he left, strewing his path with flowers. Next yeai 
 Herod returned the visit at Sinope, lavishing bounty on heathen and 
 Jewish communities alike, on his journey out and back. The Jews of 
 each city of Asia Minor seized the opportunity of his passing, to complain, 
 through him, to Agrippa, that the privileges granted them by Ca3sar were 
 not oliscrved The Greeks, on the other hand, reviled them as blood
 
 THE REIGN OP HEROD. 3? 
 
 slickers and cancers of the community, who refused to honour the gods, 
 and hence had no right to such favour, but Herod prevailed with Agrippa 
 on behalf of the Jews. For once, Jerusalem received its king heartily 
 when he returned; he, on his side, acknowledging the feeling by a 
 remittance of a quarter of the taxes of the year. 
 
 The dismal shadow that had rested over the palace in past times had 
 been in part forgotten while the two sons of the murdered Mariamne were 
 in Rome. In the year B.C. 17, however, the old troubles had begun again, 
 — to darken at last into the blackest misery. Herod had recalled his 
 sons from Rome. Alexander, the elder, was eighteen; Aristobulus, the 
 younger, about seventeen. They had grown tall, taking after their mother 
 and her race. In Italy and Judea alike, their birth and position, amidst so 
 many snares, won them universal sympathy. Roman education had given 
 them an open, straightforward way, however, that was ill-fitted to hold its 
 own with their crafty fawning Idumean connections, in Jerusalem. Their 
 morals had, moreover, suffered by their residence in Rome, so that Alex- 
 ander, at least, appears to have exposed himself to charges against which 
 Jewish ecclesiastical law denounced death. In any case they were heirs to 
 the hatred that had been borne towards their mother. Her fate doubtless 
 affected their bearing towards their father, and it was said that they 
 wished to get the process against Mariamne reversed, and her accusers 
 punished. Their ruin was doubtless determined from the first ; and their 
 unsuspicious frankness, which showed their aversion to the other members 
 of the family, gave materials for slander, and aided in their destruction. 
 Herod sought to reconcile the strife by the course usual at the time, and 
 married Aristobulus to his sister Salome's daughter Berenice, who was, 
 unfortunately, still, entirely under the hostile influence of her mother, 
 though she afterwards grew to be a worthy woman. Alexander, as became 
 the heir to the throne, was married to a king's daughter, Glaphj-ra, of tha 
 family of Archelaus, king of Cappadocia — a daughter of a prostitute o{ 
 the temple of Venus in Corinth, whom Archelaus had married. The bride 
 might be fair, but she was not prudent, and filled the palace in Jerusalem 
 with stories of her contempt for Herod's family as compared with her 
 own. Whatever Aristobulus said to his wife was carried to Salome, and 
 spies were set on the two young men, to report what they could. The 
 quarrels of the women grew fiercer daily, and involved the two brothers 
 fatally. Nothing else was spoken of in the city but the strife in the 
 palace. Another element of mischief was soon added. Herod's youngest 
 brother, Pheroras, joined the party of Salome. He had married a slave girl, 
 who was so devoted to the Pharisees that she got her husband to pay for 
 tlicm the penalties Herod had imposed, for their having refused to take 
 the oath of allegiance. Pheroras, who was a true Edomite in his fickle 
 faithlessness, was a born conspirator. He had ])lotted already against 
 Herod, and resolved, in revenge for Glaphyra's loose tongue about his 
 low marriage, to join Salome, and hunt the two youths to death. 
 
 On Herod's return from his visit to Agrippa in Asia Minor, in tho 
 winter of b.c. 14, he found the palace in a ferment, and heard for the first 
 time that the youths intended to apply to Augustus to have the process
 
 38 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 against Mariamne reversed. In his rage, ho resolved to recall Antipater, 
 his eldest son, who, "with his mother, had been l)anished from the court 
 on account of Mariamne, and Avas thus a deadly enemy of her sons. 
 This step was the ruin of Herod's peace. Antipater instantly joined 
 Salome's party: watched every step and caught every word of the un- 
 suspecting youths ; never himself accused them to his father, l:)ut plaj^ed 
 the part of lago consummately, in exciting the suspicions to which Herod's 
 guiltj^ conscience was only too prone. The presence of an elder brother not 
 having sufficed to humble the two, Antipater's mother, Doris, was also 
 recalled to court ; that they might see hoAV their hopes of the throne were 
 vanishing. Their enemies, moreover, did their best to stir them up 
 against each other, to work more harm to both. 
 
 Antipater, erelong, got himself named as heir, and was sent, as such, to 
 Rome, in the year B.C. 13, but even from Italy he managed to deepen his 
 father's suspicions so much, that Herod himself went to Rome, taking the 
 two young men with him, to have them tried before Cajsar for intended 
 parricide. They defended themselves so well, however, that an outward 
 reconciliation followed, and Herod returned to Jerusalem with them, as 
 joint heirs, with Antipater, of his dominions. 
 
 But the quiet was soon disturbed. The mutual hatred of the women, 
 and the plots of Pheroras and Antipater, tliough for a time fruitless, made 
 progress in the end. At their suggestion, the slaves of the youths were 
 tortured, and accused Alexander of conspiracy; and he, weary of life, 
 and furious at the toil laid for him, was foolish enough to say that he v.'a3 
 guilty, but only in common with all Herod's relations, except Antipater. 
 The unfortunate young man made an exception in his case as a special and 
 trusted friend ! The whole of Herod's connections were now unanimous 
 for his death, but it was not to happen yet. His father-in-law found means 
 to appease Herod once more, which Avas the easier, as Herod had discovered 
 the deceit of Pheroras, and had found his sister Salome carrying on 
 intrigues Avhich he did not approve. 
 
 He was indeed to be pitied. The family quarrels embittered his 
 existence, and his suspicions had been so excited that he trusted nobody. 
 Every one Avas suspected, and could only defend himself by raising suspi- 
 cions against others. A Greek at court determined to profit by the 
 position of affairs and bring it to a final crisis. Trusting to get money 
 from Antipater, Herod, and Archelaus alike, if he ended the matter, he 
 laid his plans to bring about the death of the young men. Forging 
 dociiments and inventing acts, he made Herod Ijelieve that his sons Avero 
 really plotting his death. The tyrant fortliAvitli had them thrown into 
 chains, and their slaves put to torture, stoning those who confessed any 
 guilt. !N"o thing kept him from putting the princes to death but fear of 
 offending Augustus, for even Salome tormented him day and night to kill 
 them, though one Avas her son-in-laAA". At last Herod sent to Rome for 
 permission from Augustus to put them to death. The request cost him 
 the croAvn of Arabia, Augustus declaring tliat the man avIio could not keep 
 his house in order Avas unfit to be trusted Avith additional kingdoms. Yet 
 he gaAe him permission to do as he thought fit Avith his sons. A court,
 
 THE REIGN OF HEROD, 39 
 
 one-half of Eomans, one-half of Jews, was now held at Berytns, and Herod 
 appeared as prosecutor. In vain the Eoman proconsul brought his three 
 sons with him to excite the grey-headed despot's fatherly feelings. He 
 acted like a madman : detailed his injuries with the utmost passion, and 
 supplied the want of proof by bursts of fury. The sentence was giren as 
 ho desired, and he had the satisfaction of having pursued his CTrn sons 
 to the death. In the year B.C. 7, the princes were strangled at Samaria, 
 where Herod had married their mother. 
 
 If the hoai'y mui-dcrer hoped for peace by this new crime he was deceived. 
 Antipatcr lived with his two brothers, Archelaus and Philip, at Eome, and, 
 there, first excited them against his father, and then betrayed them to 
 him. Pheroras, Herod's ]:>rother, he sought to make his tool in killing 
 Herod. He was afraid that if he did not destroy his father soon his own 
 infinite villany in the past would be discovered. Pheroras was, in fact, in a 
 false position. His wife and her relations were strongly on the side of the 
 Pharisees, who wished above everything to destroy Herod, and put 
 Pheroras, as their fi-icnd, on the throne. Prophecies were circulated by 
 them, that it was the will of God that Herod and his sons should lose the 
 kingdom, and that Pheroras and his wife should inherit it. Their tool, 
 Herod's euniich, Bagoas, was to have a son who would be the Messiah. 
 Many were won over in the palace, but the plot was discovered, and many 
 Rabbis and others put to death. Herod demanded that Pheroras should 
 divorce his wife, but he preferred to leave the court and go to Perea with 
 her, rather than forsake her. Here he soon after suddenly died, report 
 said, by poison. Herod, however, had his body brought to Jerusalem, 
 and appointed a great national mourning on his account. 
 
 Inquiry respecting his death at last brought to light the whole secret 
 history of years. He had died by taking poison, sent by Antipater to 
 kill Herod. The plot was found to have wide ramifications where least 
 suspected. Even the second Mariamne was proved to have been privy to 
 it, and her son Herod was on this account blotted out of his father's will. 
 Thus, as Josephus says, did the ghosts of Alexander and Aristobulus go 
 round all the palace, and bring the most deeply hidden secrets to light, 
 summoning to the judgment seat those who seemed freest from suspicion. 
 
 Antipatcr was now unmasked, and Herod saw the kind of man for whom 
 he had sacrificed his wife and his sons. With pretended friendliness he 
 sent for him from Rome, nor did any one warn him of his danger, though 
 proceedings had gone on many months against his mother, ending in her 
 divorce. Perhaps, says Josephus, the spirits of his inni'dered Ijrothers had 
 closed the mouths of those who might have put him on his guard. His first 
 hint of danger was given by no one being at Cassarea to receive him, when 
 he landed, but he could not now go back, and determined to put a bold face 
 on it. As he rode up to Jerusalem, howevei', he saw that his escort was 
 taken from him, and he now felt that he was ruined. Herod received him 
 as he deserved, and handed him over for trial to the Syrian proconsul. 
 All hastened to give witness against one so universally hated. It was 
 proved that ho had sought to poison his father. A criminal who was 
 forced to drink what Antipater had sent for Herod, presently fell dead. 
 Antipater was led away in chains.
 
 40 'riiE Lii'^li: OP christ 
 
 The strong nature oi Herod at last gave way under sucli revelations, 
 which ho forthwith communicated to his master at Rome. A deadly 
 illness seized him, and word ran through Jerusalem that he could not 
 recover. The Eabbis could no longer repress their hatred of him, and of 
 the Romans. Their teachings through long years were about to bear fruit- 
 Two were especially popular, Judas, the son of Sariphai, and Matthias, the 
 son of Margolouth, round whom a whole army of young men gathered 
 daily, drinking in from them the spirit of revolution. All that had 
 happened was traced to the anger of Jehovah at Herod's desecration of the 
 Temple and city, and violations of the Law, during his whole reign. To 
 win back the divine favour to the nation, the heathen profanations erected 
 by Herod in the Temple must be pulled down, especially the golden eagle 
 over the great gate. Living or dying, they would have eternal rewards for 
 this fidelity to the laws of their fathers. Such counsels from venerated 
 teachers were like fire to the inflammable passions of youth. In the 
 middle of the day a vast crowd of students of the Law rushed to the 
 Temple ; let themselves down with ropes from the top of the great gate, 
 tore down the hated symbol of Rome and idolatry, and hacked it to pieces 
 in the sti-eets. Mobs rose in other parts of the city, also, to throw do-^vn 
 other objects of popular hatred, but the troops turned out, and the 
 Tinarmed rioters Avere scattered, leaving forty young Pharisees in the 
 hands of the military. Brought before Herod and asked who had coun- 
 selled them to act as they had done, they answered, touchinglj^, that they 
 did it in obedience to the LaAV. In vain he tried to alarm them by saying 
 they must die : they only replied that their eternal reward would be so 
 much the greater. The two Rabbis and the young men were sent to 
 Jericho for trial before Herod, and the Rabbis and the ringleaders Avere 
 burned alive, the others being beheaded. On the night after they suffered 
 there was an eclipse of the moon, Avhich fixes the date as the 11th of 
 March, B.C. 4. 
 
 Death Avas noAV busy Avith Herod himself. His life had been a splendid 
 failure. He had a wide kingdom, but his life had been a long struggle 
 Avith public enemies or with domestic troubles, and in his old age he found 
 that all this misery, Avhich had made him the murderer of his wife, her 
 mother, and his two sons, not to speak of other relations and connections, 
 had been planned for selfish ends by those whom he had trusted. The 
 curse had come back on him to the full, for his eldest son had sought to 
 murder him. His government had been no less signal a failure, for revolt 
 had burst into flames at the mere report of his death. The strong man 
 AA^as bowed to the dust at last. A loathsome disease prostrated him, and 
 he suffered such agonies that men said it was a punishment for his 
 countless iniquities. Carried across the Dead Sea to the sulphur baths of 
 Callirhoe, he fainted and almost died under the treatment. All round 
 him Avere alarmed lest he should do so before ordering the execution of 
 Antipater, Ijut an attempt on the part of the prisoner to bribe his gaoler 
 was fatal to him. Augustus had granted permission for his execution, 
 Avith the caustic irony, that it was better to be Herod's soat than his sou. 
 Five days after Antijoater had fallen Herod himself expired. He was in 
 his seventy-first or scA^enty-second year when he died.
 
 TUE JEWISH WORLD AT THE TIME OF CIIlHST. 41 
 
 CHAPTEE, V. 
 
 THE JEWISH WORLD AT THE TIME OF CHRIST. 
 
 TT7HEN the conquest of Babylon by Darius and Cyrus had transferred 
 the fate of the Jews, then in captivity in that empire, to the 
 victorious Persian, their long exile had had its natural effect in rekindling 
 their zeal for the religion of their fathers, and of intensifying their desire 
 to return to their own land. Before Cyrus finally advanced to the conquest 
 of the great city, more than twenty years had been spent, for the most 
 part, in distant military operations. But long before he drew near 
 Babylon, the Jewish leaders, stimulated by the assurances of the prophets 
 then living, or of earlier date, felt sure of his victory, and of the speedy 
 deliverance of their nation from their hated oppressors. The glorious 
 promises of the later chapters of Isaiah, and the exultation of many of the 
 Psalms of the period, arc doubtless only illustrations of the intense 
 spiritual excitement that prevailed in the Jewish community, throughout 
 the lands of their exile, during the years immediately preceding the fall of 
 Babylon. All that was noblest in them had been roused to an enthusiasm 
 which might, perhaps, become perverted, but was, henceforth, never to 
 die. The spirit of intense nationality, fed by zeal for their religion as the 
 true faith — confided to them exclusively as the favourites of Heaven — had 
 been gi'adually kindled, and yearned, with an irrepressible earnestness, for 
 a return to their own country, that they might be free to fulfil its require- 
 ments. Men of the purest and warmest zeal for the honour and the 
 historic rights of their race had never been wanting during the captivity, 
 as the natural leaders of their brethren, and now took advantage of the 
 character and circumstances of Cyrus to obtain from him a favourable 
 decree for the restoration of Jerusalem, and the free return to it of their 
 people. In the year 536 before Christ, such as were most zealous for their t 
 religion, and most devoted to their country and race, were thus enabled 
 once more to settle in the land of their fathers, under the protection of the 
 Persian empire, of which they continued subjects for two hundred years, 
 till Alexander the Great, in B.C. 333, overthrew the Persian power. 
 
 The new community, which was to found the Jewish nation for a second 
 time, was by no means numerous, for we still know with certainty that the 
 ■whole number of these Pilgrim Fathers, wdio gathered together amidst the 
 ruins of Jerusalem, and the other cities which were open to them, did not 
 amount to more than 42,360 men, with 7,337 sei'vants of both sexes. The 
 dangers and difficulties before those who might return had winnowed the 
 wheat from the chaff : the fainted-hearted and indifferent had lingered 
 behind, and only the zealots and puritans of the captivity had followed 
 Zerubljabel, the leader of the new Exodus. 
 
 The rock on which Jewish nationality had foundered in former times 
 hadJjeentoo frank an intercourse Avith other nations ; too groat a readiness 
 to adopt their customs, and even their heathenism ; too slight a regard to 
 the distinctively Jewish code of social and political law ; and, Avith these, 
 too wide a corruption of morals. The very existence of the nation had
 
 42 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 been imperilled, and, now, the one fixed tliouglit, of leader and people 
 alike, was to make it safe for the future. 
 
 Their manners, and their whole system of civil and religious laws, offered 
 a ready and effectual means to aid them in this supreme object. It was only 
 necessary to secure an intensely conservative spirit which should exclude 
 all change, and Israel would henceforth have an abiding vitality as a 
 separate people. Nor was this difficult, for the ancient frame-work of 
 their social polity largely provided for it. The spirit of Judaism, as embodied 
 in its sacred law, directly commanded, or indirectly implied, all that was 
 needed. Intercourse with other nations, as far as possible, must bo 
 prevented; the introduction of foreign culture shut out; the youth of 
 the nation trained on a fixed model; and, finally, no gap must be left by 
 which new opinions might possibly rise from within the people themselves. 
 For this last end some studies must be entirely prohibited, and others 
 rewarded with supreme honour and advantage. Finally, some caste or 
 class must make it their special care to see that this great aim of national 
 isolation be steadily carried out — a caste which should itself be secure of 
 abiding unchangeableness, by clinging fanatically to all that was old and 
 traditional, and shrinking from any contact with whatever was foreign or 
 new. 
 
 The Mosaic laws had already inclined the Jew to a dislike to friendly 
 intercourse witli other nations, and this feeling grew to a fixed contempt 
 and aversion towards the rest of mankind, after the return, as .Judaism 
 deepened into a haughty bitterness of soul, under the influence of national 
 sufferings, and weakened spiritual life. Tacitus describes the Jews of 
 his day as true to each other and ready with help, but filled with bitter 
 hatred towards all other men ; eating and marrying only among them- 
 selves ; a people marked by sensual passions, but indulging them only 
 within their own race . . . The first instruction to proselytes, says 
 he, is to despise the gods, to abjure their country, and to cast off parents, 
 children, or brothers. Juvenal paints them as refusing to point out the 
 way to any but a Jew, or to lead any one, not circumcised, to a fountain he 
 sought. 
 
 A nation which thus hated all other men would be little disposed to sit 
 at the feet of any peoi^le as scholars. Prejudice, strengthened by express 
 laws, shut out all foreign culture. A curse was denounced against any 
 Jew who kept pigs, or taught his child Greek. No one could hope for 
 eternal life who read the books of other nations. Josephus, with true 
 Jewish pride, and smooth hypocrisy, tells us that his race looked doAvn on 
 those who had learned the language of foreign nations, such an accom- 
 plishment being common not only to free-born men, but to any slave who 
 fancied it. He only is reckoned wise, he adds, among the Jews, who is 
 skilled in the Law, and able to explain the sacred writings. In the days 
 of our Lord, when advancement could l^e obtained only by a knowledge of 
 Greek and of Grecian culture, pride and scruples often gave way before 
 interest. Still the nation, as a whole, held ignorance of everything not 
 Jewish a sacred part of their religion. 
 
 It was as little permitted that the hated Gentile should learn the Hebrew
 
 THE JEWISH WORLD AT THE TIME OP CnRIST. 43 
 
 language or read the Law. St. Jerome expatiates on the trouble and cost 
 he had at Jorusaleni and Bethlehem to get a Jew to help him in his 
 Hebrew studies. His teacher " feared the Jews, like a second Nicodemus." 
 " He who teaches infidels the LaAV," said the Eabbis, " transgresses the 
 express words of the command ; for God made Jacob " (the Jews, not the 
 heathen) "to know the Law." 
 
 But though thus jealous of otliers, the greatest care was taken bj^ the 
 Jew to teach his own people the sacred books. Josephus boasts that " if 
 any one asked one of his nation a question respecting their Law, he could 
 answer it more readily than give his own name ; for he learns every part 
 of it from the first dawn of intelligence, till it is graven into his very 
 soul." That every Jewish child should be taught to read, v/as held a 
 religious duty ; and every boy was required to learn the Law. There n as 
 no Jew who did not know thoroughly the duties and rites of his religion, 
 and the great deeds of his fathers ; the misfortune was, that they were 
 kept ntterly ignorant of any other history than their own. 
 
 The exact knowledge of the contents of the Books of the Law was, thus, 
 within the reach of all ; but much more was needed than the mere learning 
 by heart the five Books of Moses, to gain the repute of a finished legal 
 knowledge. The almost endless comments of the Eabbis must be mastered, 
 by years of slavish labour, before one was recognised as a really educated 
 man. Hence the nation was divided into two great classes of learned and 
 unlearned, between whom there lay a wide gulf. Puffed up with bound- 
 less pride at their attainments, the former frankly denounced their less 
 scholarly countrymen as " cursed countrymen " or boors. 
 
 The first trace of a distinct caste of professional legalists, if I may call 
 them so, is found in the daj^s of Ezra and Wehemiah, some eighty years 
 after the return from Babylon. Jewish tradition speaks of these early 
 Rabbis as the " men of the Great Synagogue," and adds that they trod in 
 the footsteps of the prophets — that is, that they were their virtual suc- 
 cessors. From the first they had great influence in the State. To secure 
 a far more strict observance of the Law than had been known before, they 
 gradually formed what they called a hedge round it — that is, they added 
 endless refinements and subtleties to every command, that by the ob- 
 servance of such external rites and precepts, the command itself should 
 be the less in danger of being broken. To this " hedge " Judaism owes 
 the rigid fidelity of its people ever since ; for rites and forms at all times 
 find a much stricter obedience from the masses than the commands of a 
 spiritual religion. 
 
 In spite of all precautions, however, the new State had already the 
 seeds of religious division in its midst, in a number of doctrines, hitherto 
 more or less unknown, which had been brought back in the return from 
 the captivity. These were adopted by the orthodox party, who were the 
 great majority, but rejected by a few, in whom may be traced the germ of 
 the sect afterwards known as the Sadducees. The orthodox leaders, on 
 the other hand, were the beginning of the party afterwards known as 
 the Pharisees. It was they who put the " hedge " round the Law ; the 
 Sadducees insisted on standing by the simple letter of the laws of Moses
 
 44 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 alone. The one were the High-Churchmen of their nation, the others the 
 Rationalists, with a cold creed which denied the existence of angels, the 
 resurrection of the dead, and a future state, and rejected Rabbinical 
 tradition. The mass of the nation followed the Pharisees : the Saddvicees 
 were always a very small body. 
 
 The Pharisees, as the leaders of the great bulk of the people, soon 
 merged more strictly religious aims in the political one of moulding the 
 State into a spurious independent theocracy, under the rule of their 
 party. The Law, as expounded by them, with their thousand additions, 
 was to rule supreme, in civil as Avell as religious life ; in the affairs of the 
 nation, as well as those of the individual. 
 
 The stormy times of the later Maccabaean kings gave the Pharisees an 
 opportunity of playing a great part in the nation. The priests had pre- 
 viously given the new State a head in the person of the high priest, 
 Simon, brother of Judas MaccabEeus. But his grandsons quarrelled, and 
 the future history of the house became little more than a record of 
 cruelties, disputes for the throne, civil wars, and persecutions. The 
 orthodox party, led by the Pharisees, stoutly resisted the growing corrup- 
 tion, which ended by the Romans assuming supreme authority in Judea, 
 with Herod as the vassal king. Asked to be arbiters, they ended as con- 
 querors. The supremacy of the Pharisees, who had done much to assist 
 the popular cause, was now secure. They had organized themselves as a 
 great power in the State, and maintained this position till the fall of the 
 nation. Under Herod and the Romans, they were the soul of the great 
 national party, which only sullenly submitted to Herod and his family, or 
 to the Roman power, as, alike, foreign oppressors, whom they could not 
 shake off, foes accursed of God, as usurpers of His heritage. To them 
 may be traced the restless turbulence of the nation, which neither terror 
 nor flattery could appease — a tui-bulence which made Judea, to Hei-od and 
 the Roman emperors, what Ireland at one time was to England, and 
 Poland to Russia — the seat of chronic revolt, which knew no considera- 
 tions of odds against success, and seemed to take counsel of despair. 
 
 At the time of our Lord the Pharisees were at the height of their power. 
 Josephus tells us that they numbered above 6,000 men in Judea, in the 
 days of Herod the Great ; that the women, as especially given to religious 
 enthusiasm, were on their side, and that they even had power enough, at 
 times, to defy the king. He describes them by name as a party among 
 the Jews who prided themselves greatly on their knowledge of the Law, 
 and made men believe they were holier than their neighbours, and especi- 
 all}^ in favour with God, and relates how they plotted with some of the 
 ladies of Herod's family to put Herod to death. They thwarted and 
 opposed the king, he says, on every hand, refusing to own his authority 
 or that of Rome, or to swear allegiance either to him or the Emperor, 
 when all the nation was called on to do so, and, with the exception of 
 them, consented. They even claimed the gift of prophecy, through the 
 inspiration of God, asserting that He had decreed that Herod should die, 
 and that the kingdom would pass to those who had shown them favour. 
 The Sadducees had shrunk to a party few in number, thongh high ni
 
 THE JEWISH WORLD AT THE TIME OF CHRIST. 45 
 
 position, and had become so unpopular that when ajipointed to any office, 
 they accepted it sorely against their will, and were forced to carry out 
 the views of their I'ivals — the Pharisees — for fear of the popular fury. 
 
 The political schemes of this great party were not confined to Judea. 
 Its members were numerous in every part of the Roman empire, and were 
 all closely bound to each other. Without a formal organization or a 
 recognised head, they wei'e yet, in fact, a disciplined army, by implicit 
 and universal assent to the same opinions. The same spirit and aim 
 inspired all alike : teacher and follower, over the world, were but mvitual 
 echoes. They were, in effect, the democratic party of their nation, the 
 true representatives of the people, with the Maccabajan creed that " God 
 has given to all, alike, the kingdom, priesthood, and holiness." They 
 considered themselves the guardians of the Law and of the ancestral 
 customs, and trusted implicitly that He who selected iheir nation to be 
 His peculiar people would protect them and their country from all dangei's, 
 believing that, as long as they were faithful to God, no earthly power 
 would in the end be permitted to rule over them. They repudiated the 
 time-serving policy of the Herodian Sadducees, who maintained that a 
 man's destiny was in his own hands, and that human policy ought to 
 dictate political action. Their noble motto was that " everything depends 
 upon God but a man's piety." The misfortune was that, to a large extent, 
 tlioy divorced religion from morality, laying stress on the exact perform- 
 ance of outward rites, rather than on the duties of the heart and life, 
 so that it was possible, as has been said of the Indian Brahmins, for the 
 worst men among them to be, in their sense, the most religious. 
 
 The one thought of this great party, in every land, was nothing less 
 than the founding of a grand hierarchy, perhaps under the Messiah, in 
 which the Jews should reign over the whole world, and Jerusalem become 
 the metropolis of the earth. They did not confine themselves to the 
 spread of superstition and fanaticism amongst their own race, but sought 
 proselytes in every country, especially among the rich and among women. 
 In Rome itself, sunk as it was, like all the Gentile world of that age, in 
 the dreariness of worn-out religions, they made many female converts 
 among the great, even in the palace of the Caesars. Their kindness to 
 their poor, their loving family life, their pui-e morals compared to the 
 abominations of the times, their view of death as a sleep, their hope of 
 resting with the just, and rising with them to immortal happiness, had 
 special charms in such an age. The Great Synagogue of Ezra's day^ 
 according to their traditions, had left them a solemn charge — "to make 
 many scholars ; " and they compassed sea and land, in furtherance of this 
 command, to secure one proselyte, though their worthless dependence, in 
 too many cases, on mere outward religiousness, often made him, when 
 won, " twofold more the child of hell than themselves." The vast numbers 
 thus gained to Judaism are shown in the multitudes from all countries 
 present at the Passover immediately after our Lord's death, and from 
 many passages in heathen writers. 
 
 The Pharisees, or, as I may call them, the Rabbis, had thrown the 
 hereditary priestly body of the nation quite into the shade in the days of
 
 46 . , THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Christ. A priest gained his position by birtli; a Eabbi owed his to 
 himself. The Temple service, and the vast sums of money received from 
 Jews in all parts of the world, as a yearly tax in support of their religion, 
 gave the priests great influence, and opened, to the higher grades, the 
 control of the greatest ecclesiastical offices in the nation, v>^hich still 
 survived. But the influence of the Pharisees was so overwhelmins: that 
 even the high priests were glad to respect their opinions, to secure public 
 favour. " A priest," says the Mischna, " has precedence of a Levite, a 
 Levite of other Israelites, a common Israelite of a bastard, a bastard of 
 one of the JNTethinim, a Nethin of a foreign proselyte, a foreign proselyte 
 of a freed .slave. This is the law when these persons are equal in other 
 respects; but if a Ijastard be a Eabbi (a scholar of the wise), and the 
 high priest not a Rabbi (and, therefore, one of 'the ignorant country 
 people ' who are ' cursed ' for not knowing the Pharisaic traditions and 
 requirements), such a bastard takes a liigher place than such a high 
 priest." The multitudinous rites and ceremonies of the Mosaic Law, with 
 the vast additions of the Pharisaic "hedge," and the corrupting influence 
 of power and gener.il flattery, had the worst effects on the Pharisees as a 
 body. They gave themselves up largely to foi'malism, outward religious- 
 ness, self-complacency, immeasurable spiritual pride, love of praise, super- 
 stition, and deceit, till at last, after the destruction of the Temple, tliey 
 themselves laid the name of Pharisee aside, from its having become the 
 symbol of mingled fanaticism and hypocrisy. How thoroughly does this 
 vindicate the language often used respecting them in the Gospels ! 
 
 Yet it must not be thought that there were no good men in their number. 
 Though the Talmud names six classes of them, which it denounces, it has 
 a seventh — the Pharisee from Iiove, who obeys God because he loves Him 
 with all his heart. But the six classes doubtless marked the character- 
 istics of too large a proportion. Among the many figures whom our Lord 
 passed in the streets of Jerusalem, and elsewhere, He must often have met 
 those to v«'hom the by-name was given of Shechemite Pharisees — who kept 
 the Law only for interest, as Shechem submitted to circumcision simply to 
 obtain Dinah ; or the Tumbling Pharisee, who, to appear humble before 
 men, always hung down his head, and shuffled with his feet on the ground, 
 so that he constantly stumbled ; or the Bleeding Pharisee, who, to keep 
 himself from seeing a woman, walked with his eyes shut, and, so, often 
 bled his head against posts; or the Mortar Phai'isee, with a cap like a 
 mortar over his eyes, to shut out all that might shock his pure nature ; or 
 the What-more-can-I-do Pharisee, who claimed to have kept the whole 
 _jaw, and wished to know something new, that he might do it also ; or the 
 Pharisee from Fear, Avho kept the Law only for fear of the judgment to 
 come. But He would also see Pharisees such as Hillel, the greatest of the 
 Eabbis, the second Ezra, who was, perhaps, still alive when Christ was 
 born — who taught his school of a thousand pupils such precepts as " to be 
 gentle, and show all meekness to all men," "when reviled not to revile 
 again," to "Love peace and pursue it, be kindly affectionate to all men, 
 and thus commend the law of God," or " Whatsoever thou wouldst not 
 that a man should do to thee, do not thou to him," — or like just Simeon,
 
 THE EABBIS AT THE TIME OF CHEIST. 47 
 
 who was a Pharisee, or Zacharias, the father of the Baptist, or Gamaliel, 
 the teacher of Paul, or like Paul himself, for all these were Pharisees, and 
 must have been types of many moi'e. 
 
 The Pharisees had, however, as a whole, outlived their true usefulness 
 in the days of Christ, and had become largely a holloAV pretence and 
 hypocrisy, as the monks and friars of Luther's day, or earlier, had outlived 
 the earnest sincerity and real worth of the days of their founders. They 
 had done good service in former times, in keeping alive the faith of their 
 nation in the Messiah, the Kingdom of Heaven, the immortality of the 
 soul, and the judgment to come, but they were now fast sinking into the 
 deep corruption which, in a generation after Christ's death, made them 
 dro]j tl\e very name of their party. 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 THE EABBIS AT THE TIME OF CIIRIST, AND THEIB IDEAS RESPECTING 
 
 THE MESSIAH. 
 
 IF the most important figures in the society of Christ's day were the 
 Pharisees, it was because they were the Eabbis or teachers of the Law. 
 As such they received superstitious honour, which was, indeed, the great 
 motive, with manj', to court the title or join- the party. 
 
 The Eabbis were classed with Moses, the patriarchs, and the prophets, 
 and claimed equal reverence. Jacob and Joseph were both said to have 
 been Eabbis. The Targum of Jonathan substitutes Eabbis, or Scribes, for 
 the word "prophets," where it occurs. Josephns speaks of the prophets 
 of Saul's day as Eabbis. In the Jerusalem Targum all the patriarchs are 
 learned Eabbis : Isaac learned in the school of Seth ; Jacob attended the 
 school of Eber ; and, hence, no wonder that Eabbis are a delight to God 
 like the incense burned before Him ! They were to be dearer to Israel 
 than father or mother, because parents avail only in this world, but the 
 Eabbi for ever. They were set above kings, for is it not written, "Through 
 me kings reign " ? Their entrance into a house brought a blessing; to live 
 or to cat with them was the highest good fortune. To dine with a Eabbi 
 was as if to enjoy the splendour of heavenly majesty, for it is written, 
 " Then came Aaron and all the elders in Israel, to eat bread with Moses' 
 father-in-law before God." 
 
 To learn a single verse, or even a single letter, from a Pi-abbi could be 
 repaid only by the profoundest respect, for did not tradition say that David 
 learned only two words from Ahithophel, and yet, simply for this, David 
 made him his teacher, counsellor, and friend, as it is written, " Thou art 
 a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance ? " The table of the 
 Eablji was nobler than that of kings ; and his crown more glorious than 
 theirs. 
 
 The Eabbis went even further than this in exalting their order. The 
 Mischna declares that it is a greater crime to speak anything to their 
 discredit than to speak against the words of the Law. The words of the
 
 48 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 llalj'bis are to be held as worth more than the words of the prophets; fur the 
 prophet is like a kmg's legate who is to be owned on showing his master's 
 signet, but the Rabbis need no such witness, since it is written of them, 
 " Thou shalt do according to the sentence which they shall show thee ; " 
 whereas it is said of the prophets, "If he giveth thee a sign or a wonder." 
 Miracles are related which happened to confirm the sayings of Eabbis. 
 One cried out, when his opinion was disputed, "May this tree prove that I 
 am right ! " and forthwith the tree was torn up by the roots, and hurled a 
 Imndred ells off. But his opponents declared that a tree could prove nothing. 
 " May this stream, then, witness for me ! " cried Eliezer, and at once it 
 flowed the opposite way. Still, his opponents urged tliat water could 
 prove notliing. " Now," said Eliezer, " if truth be on my side, may the 
 walls of the school confirm it ! " He had scarcely spoken when the walls 
 began to bow inwards. The Rabbi Joshua threatened them : " What is it 
 to you if the sons of the wise dispute ? you shall not fall ; " and, to honour 
 Rablji Joshua, the walls did not fall wholly together ; but neither did tliey 
 go back to their places, but remain slanting to this day, that the honour 
 of Rabin Eliezer might not suffer. At last Eliezer called for the decision 
 of heaven : " If I am right, let heaven witness." Then came a voice from 
 heaven, and said, "Why dispute ye with Rabbi Eliezer .'^ he is always 
 right ! " 
 
 Inordinate pride, one might think, could hardly go farther than this, but 
 the bigoted vanity of the Rabbis Christ had daily to meet, was capable 
 even of blasphemy in its claims. The Talmud tells us that there are 
 schools of the heavenly Rabbis above, as well as those of the earthly 
 Rabbis here, and relates that there once rose in the great Rabbi's school 
 of heaven a dispute respecting the law of the leper. The Almighty, who 
 is the Chief Rabbi of the skies, pronounced a certain case, detailed in the 
 text, as clean. But all the angels thought differently — for the angels are 
 the scholars iii this great academy. Then said they, " Who shall decide in 
 this matter between us?" It was agreed on both sides — God and the 
 angels — to summon Ravah, the son of Nachman, since he was wont to say 
 of himself, " No one is equal to me in questions respecting lej^rosy." 
 Thereupon the Angel of Death was sent to him, and caused him to die, 
 and brought his soul up to heaven, where Ravah, when brought before 
 the heavenly academy, confirmed the opinion of God, which gave God 
 no little delight. Then heavenly voices, which sounded down even to the 
 earth, exalted the name of Ravah greatly, and mii-acles were wrought at 
 his grave. 
 
 Such a story illustrates better than any words the audacious claims and 
 blasjihemous spiritual pride with which our Lord had to contend, and 
 which He often rebukes in the Pharisees of His day. Even the Talmud 
 itself, in other parts, is forced to reprove it. The only palliation of it lies 
 in the fact that the Law itself was written in a language which the people 
 had long ceased to speak, so that it was left to the Rabbis to explain and 
 apply it. The heads and leaders of the nation, they kept it in their lead- 
 ing-strings. It had come into their hands thus, and they were determined 
 to keep it in the same state. Heresy, which would be fatal to the blind
 
 THE RABBIS AT THE TIME OP CHRIST. 49 
 
 unanimity which was their political strength, could only be excluded by 
 rigidly denouncing the least departure from their precejjts. The Law and 
 the Prophets must, therefore, be understood only in the sense of their 
 traditions. The reading of the Scriptures was hence discouraged, lest it 
 should win thoir hearts, and they should cease to reverence the words of 
 the Eabbis. One hour was to be spent on the Scriptures in the schools : 
 two on the traditions. The study of the Talmud alone won honour from 
 God as from man. That vast mass of traditions, which now fills twelve 
 folio volumes, was, in reality, the Bible of the Eabbis and of their scholars. 
 
 Yet, in form, the Law received boundless honour. Every saying of the 
 Rabbis had to be based on some woi'ds of it, which were, however, 
 explained in their own way. Tlie spirit of the times, the wild fanaticism 
 of the people, and their own bias, tended, alike, to make them set value 
 only on ceremonies and worthless externalisms, to the utter neglect of the 
 spirit of the sacred writings. Still, it was owned that the Law needed no 
 confirmation, while the words of the Eabbis did. 
 
 So far as the Eoman authority under which they lived left them free, 
 the Jews willingly put all power in the hands of the Eabbis. They or 
 their nominees filled every office, from the highest in the priesthood to the 
 lowest in the community. They were the casuists, the teachers, the 
 priests, the judges, the magistrates, and the physicians of the nation. 
 But their authority went still further, for, by the Eabbinical laws, nearly 
 everything in daily life needed their counsel and aid. No one could be 
 born, circumcised, brought up, educated, betrothed, married, or buried — 
 no one could celeln-ate the Sabbath or other feasts, or begin a business, or 
 make a contract, or kill a beast for food, or even bake bread, without the 
 advice or presence of a Eabbi. The words of Christ respecting binding 
 and loosing were a Eabbinical proverb : they bound and they loosed as 
 they thought fit. AVhat they loosed was permitted— what they bound was 
 forbidden. They were the brain, the eyes, the ears, the nerves, the 
 muscles of the people, who were mere children apart from them. 
 
 This amazing power, which has lasted for two thousand j-cars, owed its 
 vitality to the fact that no Eabbi could take money for any official duty. 
 They might enslave the minds of the people, l)ut they never abused tlieir 
 despotism to make gain of them. The great Eabbi Hillel says, " He who 
 makes gain of the words of the Law, his life will be taken from the 
 world." No teacher, preacher, judge, or other Eabl)inical official, could 
 receive money for his services. In practice this grand law was somewhat 
 modified, but not to any great extent. A Rabbi might receive a moderate 
 sum for his duties, not as payment, but only to make good the loss of time 
 which he might have used for his profit. Even now it is a Jewish jjroverb 
 that a fat Eabbi is little worth, and such a feeling must have checked 
 those who, if they could, would have turned their position to pecuniary 
 advantage. 
 
 How, then, did the Eabbis live ? A child destined for this dignity 
 began his training at five years of age, and gradually shrank, in most 
 cases, into a mere pedant, with no desire in life Ijeyond the few wants 
 needed to enable him to continue his endless study. It was, moreover, 
 
 £
 
 50 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 required tliat every Ilabl)i slioiild learn a tirade by which to support 
 himself. " He who does not teach his son a trade," says Rabbi Jehuda, 
 " is much the same as if he taught him to be a thief." 
 
 In accordance with this rule, the greatest Eabbis maintained themselves 
 by trades. The most famous of them all. Rabbi Hillel, senior, supported 
 himself by the labour of his hands. One Rabbi was a needle-maker, 
 another a smith, another a shoemaker, and another, like St. Paul, who also 
 was a Rabbi, was a tent-cover weaver. Rabbis who taught in schools 
 received small presents from the children. 
 
 But there were ways by which even Rabbis could get wealth. To marry 
 the daughter of one was to advance one's-self in heaven ; to get a Rabbi 
 for a son-in-law, and provide for him, was to secure a blessing. They 
 could thus marry into the richest families, and they often did it. They 
 could, besides, become partners in prosperous commercial houses. 
 
 The office of a Rabbi was op^n to all, and this of itself secured the 
 favour of the nation to the order, just as the same democratic feeling 
 strengthened the Romish Church in the middle ages. The humblest 
 Jewish boy could be a master of the Law, as the humblest Christian, in 
 after-times, could in the same way be a monk or priest ; and the learned 
 son of a labourer might, in both cases, look down with a kind of contempt 
 on the proudest noble. 
 
 Such, then, were the Rabbis in the days of our Lord. They were 
 Pharisees as to their party, and Rabbis in their relations to the Law. 
 That one who came, not indeed to destroy the Law and the Prophets, but 
 to free them from the joerversions of Rabbinical theology, should have been 
 met by the bitterest hatred and a cruel death, was only an illustration of 
 the sad truth, to which every age has borne witness, that ecclesiastical 
 bodies which have the power to persecute, identify even the abuses of 
 their system with the defence of religion, and are capalDle of any crime in 
 their blind intolerance. 
 
 The central and dominant characteristic of the teaching of the Rabbis 
 was the certain advent of a great national Deliverer — the Messiah, or 
 Anointed of God, or, in the Greek translation of the title, the Christ. In 
 no other nation than the Jews has such a conception ever taken such root, 
 or shown such vitality. From the times of their great national troubles, 
 under their later kings, the words of Moses, David, and the prophets had, 
 alike, been cited as divine promises of a mighty Prince, who should 
 "restore the kingdom to Israel." The Captivity only deei^ened the faith 
 in His duly appearing, by increasing the need of it. Their fathers in far- 
 distant times of distraction and trouble, had clamoured for a King, who 
 should be their Messiah, the viceroy of God, anointed by prophets. 
 They had had kings, but had found only a partial good from them. As 
 ages passed, the fascination of the grand Messianic hope grew ever more 
 hallowed, and became the deepest passion in the hearts of all, burning and 
 glowing henceforth, unquenchably, more and more, and irrevocably deter- 
 mining the whole future of the nation. 
 
 For a time, Cyrus appeared to realize the promised Deliverer, or at least 
 to be the chosen instrument to prepare the way for Him. Zerubbabel, in
 
 THE EABBIS AT THE TIME OF CHRIST. 51 
 
 his turn, became the centre of Messianic hopos. Simon Maccaloajus was 
 made high-pviest-kiug only " until a faithful prophet — the Messiah — 
 should arise." As the glory of their brief independence passed away, and 
 the Roman succeeded the hated Syrian as ruler and oppressor, the hope in 
 the Star which was to come out of Jacob grew brighter, the darker the 
 night. Deep gloom filled every heart, but it was pierced by the beam of 
 this heavenly confidence. Having no present, Israel threw itself on the 
 future. Literature, education, politics, began and ended Avith the great 
 thought of the Messiah. "When would He come ? What mamier of king- 
 dom would He raise ? The national mind had become so inflammable, long 
 before Christ's day, by constant brooding on this one theme, that any bold 
 spirit, rising in revolt against the Eoman power, could find an army of 
 fierce disciples who trusted that it should be he who would redeem Israel. 
 
 " That the testimony of Jesus was the spirit of prophecy," was but the 
 Christian utterance of a universal Jewish belief respecting the Christ. 
 " All the prophets," says R. Chaja, " have pi'ophesied only of the blessed- 
 ness of the days of the Messiah." But it was to Daniel especially, with his 
 seeming exactness of dates, that the chief regard was paid. It was gene- 
 rally believed that " the times " of that prophet pointed to the twentieth 
 year of Herod the Great, and, w^hen that was past, not to mention other 
 dates, the year 67 of our reckoning was thought the period, and then the 
 year 135 ; the war which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem rising from 
 the one calculation, and the tremendous insurrection under Hadrian from 
 the other. 
 
 With a few, the conception of the Messiah's kingdom was pure and 
 lofty. The hearts of such as Zacharias, Elizabeth, Mary, Anna, Simeon, 
 and John the Baptist, realized, more or less, the need of a redemption of 
 the nation from its spiritual corruption, as the first necessity. This 
 grander conception had been slowly forming in the minds of the more 
 religious. Before the days of the Maccabees, the conception of the 
 Messiah had been that of a " Son of David," who should restore the 
 splendour of the Jewish throne ; and this, indeed, continued always the 
 general belief. But neither in the Book of Daniel nor in the later religious 
 writings of the Jews before Christ, is the Messiah thus named, nor is 
 there any stress laid on His origin or birthplace. Daniel, and all who 
 wrote after him, paint the Expected One as a heavenly being. He was the 
 Messenger, the Elect of God, appointed from eternity, to appear in due 
 time, and redeem His people. The world was committed to Him as its 
 Judge : all heathen kings and lords were destined to -sink in the dust 
 before Him, and the idols to pcrisli utterly, that the holy people, the 
 chosen of God, under Him, might reiga for ever. He was the Son of Man, 
 but, though thus man, had been hidden from eternity, in the all-glorious 
 splendour of heaven, and, indeed, was no other than the Son of God, 
 sitting at the right hand of the Majesty of His Father. He was the 
 Archetypal Man— the ideal of pure and heavenly Manhood, in contrast to 
 the fallen Adam. Two centuries before our era. He was spoken of as " the 
 Word of God," or as "the Word," and as "Wisdom," and as, in this way, 
 the Incarnation of the Godhead.
 
 52 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Such were, iu effect, the conceptions gradually matured of the Messiah 
 — the Immortal and Eternal King, clothed with divine power, and yet a 
 man — which had been drawn from the earliest, as well as the latest, sacred 
 or religious writings of the nation. But very few realized that a heavenly 
 King must imply a holy kingdom ; that His true reign must be in the 
 purified souls of men. Few realized that the true preparation for His 
 coming was not vain-glorious pride, but humiliation for sin. 
 
 The prevailing idea of the Ral^bis and the people alike, in Christ's day, 
 was, that the Messiah would be siinply a great prince, Avho should found a 
 kingdom of matchless splendour. ISTor was the idea of His heavenly 
 origin by any means universal : almost all fancied He would be only a 
 human hero, who should lead them to victory. 
 
 It was agreed among the Eabbis that His birthplace must be Bethlehem, 
 and that He must rise from the tribe of Judah. It was believed that He 
 would not know that He was the Messiah till Elias came, accompanied by 
 other prophets, and anointed Him. Till then He would be hidden from 
 the people, living unknown among them. The better Rabbis taught that 
 the sins of the nation had kept Him from aj^pearing, and that " if the 
 Jews repented for one day. He would come." He was first to appear iu 
 Galilee ; for, as the ten tribes had first suffered, they should first be 
 visited. He was to free Israel by force of arms, and subdue the world 
 under it. " How beautiful," says the Jerusalem Targum, " is the Kjng 
 Messiah, who springs from the house of Judah ! He girds His loins, and 
 descends, and orders the battle against His enemies, and slays their kings 
 and their chief cajitains ; there is no one so mighty as to stand before 
 Him. He makes the mountains red with the blood of His slaughtered 
 foes; His roljcs, dyed in their blood, are like the skins of the purple 
 grapes." " The beasts of the field will feed for twelve months on the flesh 
 of the slain, and the birds of the air will feed on them for seven years." 
 " The Lord," says the Targum, " will revenge us on the bands of Gog. At 
 that hour will the power of the nations be broken ; they will be like a ship 
 whose tackling is torn away, and whose mast is sprung, so that the sail 
 can no longer be set on it. Then will Israel divide the treasures of the 
 nations among them — a great store of booty and riches, so that, if there be 
 the lame and blind among them, even they will have their share." The 
 heathen will then turn to the Lord, and walk iu His light. 
 
 The universal kingdom thus founded was to be an earthly paradise for the 
 Jew. In that day, say the Rabbis, there will be a handful of corn on the 
 top of the mountains, and the stalks will be like palm-trees or pillars. 
 Nor will it be any trouble to reap it, for God will send a wind from His 
 chambers, which will blow down the white flour from the ears. One corn of 
 wheat will be as large as the two kidneys of the hugest ox. All the trees 
 will bear continually. A single grape will load a waggon or a ship, and 
 when it is brought to the house they will draw wine from it as from a cask. 
 
 A great king must have a great capital, and hence Jerusalem, the 
 capital of the Messiah's kingdom, will be very glorious. In tlie days to 
 come, say the Rabbis, God will bring together Sinai, Tabor, and Carmel, 
 and set Jerusalem upon them. It will be so great that it will cover as
 
 BIRTH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 53 
 
 much ground as a horse can run over from the early morning till its 
 shadow is below it at noon. It will reach to the gates o£ Damascus. 
 Some of them even tell us that its houses will be built three miles iu 
 height. Its gates will be of precious stones and pearls, thirty ells long 
 and as broad, hollowed out. The country round will be full of pearls and 
 precious stones, so that Jews from all parts may come and take of them 
 as they like. 
 
 In this splendid city the Messiah is to reign over a people who shall all 
 be prophets. A fruitful stream will break forth from the Temple and 
 water the land, its banks shaded by trees laden with the richest fruits. 
 No sickness or defect will be known. There will be no such thing as a 
 lame man, or any blind or leprous ; the dumb will speak and the deaf 
 hear. It will be a triumphal millennium of national pride, glory, and 
 enjoyment. 
 
 It was to a people drunk with the vision of such outward felicity and 
 political greatness, under a world-conquering Messiah, that Jesus Christ 
 came, with His utterly opposite doctrines of the aim and nature of the 
 Messiah and His kingdom. Only here and there was there a soul with 
 any higher or purer thoughts than such gross, material, and narrow dreams. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 BIRTH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 
 
 r I 1 HE time had at last come, when " the mj-stery which had been hid 
 -*- from ages and from generations " — the high purpose of God in the 
 two thousand years' history of Israel— was to be revealed. The true 
 relations of man to his Maker and Heavenly King had been, throughout, 
 the grand truth to be taught to mankind, in all future ages, from the 
 education and example of the Jewish race, and this truth was now to be 
 revealed directly by God Himself, all lower agencies and means having 
 proved inadequate. 
 
 The people of Israel had been set apart by God, while yet onlj^ a family, 
 as specially His own. Brought at last, after centuries, through the dis- 
 cipline of the household, the bondage of Egypt, and the life of the wilder- 
 ness, to a settled home, as a nation, in Canaan, thej'^ were still more 
 distinctly proclaimed by Him as " His peojile," " the portion of Jehovah " 
 — the "lot of His inheritance." Tlie Lord their God was their only King, 
 and they were declared to be a " people holy to Him," chosen as peculiai'lj' 
 His, " above all other nations." In them, as a nation, if they faithfully 
 observed the "covenant" which they had made with Him, was to be ex- 
 liibited the spectacle of a visible kingdom of God amongst men — its 
 obligations on the side of man, its high privileges on that of Heaven. 
 
 As centuries passed, however, it was clear that Israel failed to realize 
 the ideal of a "people of Jehovah," with Him as its direct and supreme 
 Ruler. The anarchy of the days of the Judges — a period not unlike our
 
 54 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 own early history — showed too clearly that the nation, as such, was far 
 from illustrating the true relations of man to God. 
 
 The Kingdom of God on earth, in the simplest form of His direct rules 
 with no human intervention, having proved too lofty and spiritual a con- 
 ception, the second step in its development was introduced, by the 
 appointment of a supreme magistrate as His representative and viceroy, 
 He remaining the actual Sovereign. The king of Israel stood, thus, before 
 the people, simply as the deputy of its invisible King, and was as much 
 His servant, bound in all things to carry out only His will, as any of his 
 own subjects. Yet his office, as the vicegerent of God, had an awful 
 dignity. He was "the Lord's Anointed" — his Messiah — consecrated to 
 the dignity by the holy oil, which had, till then, been used only for 
 priests. 
 
 But the ideal sought was as far from being attained as ever. The 
 history of Israel was very soon only that of other kingdoms round it. 
 Instead of being holy to Jehovah, it turned from Him to servo other gods, 
 and grew corrupt in morals as well as creed. The^ order of prophets 
 strove to restore the sinking State, and recall the nation to its faith ; and 
 good kings from time to time listened to them, and sought to carry out 
 their counsels. But the people themselves were degenerate, and many of 
 the kings found it easy to lead them into still greater sin and apostasy. 
 The prophets — at once the mouthpieces of God and the tribunes of the 
 people— nobly resisted, but only to become martyrs to their fidelity. The 
 inevitable result came, in the end, in the ruin of the State, and the exile 
 in Assyria and Babylon. 
 
 The third step was no less a failure. On the return from captivity, a 
 zeal for Jehovah as the only King of Israel became the deep and abiding 
 passion of all Jews. Henceforward, it was determined that what we 
 might call the " Church " should act as His vicegerent. By turns, priests, 
 priest-kings, and other ecclesiastical or religious leaders, led the nation ; 
 but only as temporary substitutes for a great expected King — the 
 Messiah, before whose glory even that of David or Solomon, their most 
 famous monarchs, would be as nothing. But they were as insensible as 
 ever to tlie highest characteristics of a true Prince of the "people of 
 God ; " ruler or subject, alike, looking only to outward power and splendour, 
 and political ambition, and forgetful of the grand fact that the kingdom 
 of God must, first, of necessity, be the reign of holiness and truth, in both, 
 Eeligion became a thing of outward observances, with which the heart 
 and life had no necessary connection. The Messianic hopes of the cen- 
 turies immediately before Christ degenerated into a standing conspiracy 
 of the nation against their actual rulers, and a vain confidence that God 
 would raise up some deliverer, who would "restore the kingdom to 
 Israel" in a merely political sense. 
 
 Thus the true conception of the kingdom of God had been well-nigh lost. 
 A few of the Eabljis, indeed, with a finer spiritual sense, taught tliat the 
 condition of the coming of the Messiah must be sincere repentance for 
 their sins, on the part of the nation, and a return to a purer state. But 
 such counsels had little weight with the community. Blindly self-righteous,
 
 BIRTH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 55 
 
 and yet wedded to evil, everythiug tended to a speedy extinction of Judaism 
 by its inveterate corruption. 
 
 It was at this time that the first direct steps were taken by God towards 
 the advent of the true Messiah, who should finally erect, once for all. His, 
 the true, divine, kingdom, on earth, all the dreams of winch had hitherto 
 been such disastrous failures. He would thus save Judaism from itself, 
 by perpetuating that which was permanent in it, under His holy and 
 spiritual reign. Discarding all that was merely temporally and accidental, 
 and bringing into lasting prominence whatever imperishable truth the 
 older dispensation contained, He would found the only true kingdom of 
 God possiljle on earth : one in wliich the perfect holiness of the Anointed 
 Head should stimulate a like holiness in all, and, indeed, demand it. The 
 Messianic hope was to be realized in a grander and loftier sense than man 
 had dreamed, bvit the very grandeur and loftiness of the realization would 
 attest its divine authority and source. 
 
 The priests among the Jews had been divided, since the time of David, 
 that is, for about a thousand years, into twenty-four courses, known also 
 as " houses " and " families.'' Of the original courses, however, only four, 
 each numbering about a thousand members , had returned from Babylon after 
 the captivity ; but out of these the old twenty-four courses were recon- 
 stituted, with the same names as before, that the original organization 
 might be perpetuated as far as possible. The priesthood of the second 
 Temple, however, never took the same rank as that of the first. The 
 diminished glory of the sanctuary in which it ministered, compared with 
 that of Solomon, alone, made this inevitable, for the second Temple had no 
 longer the sacred ark, with its mercy seat and the overshadowing cherubim 
 nor the holy fire, kindled at first from heaven, nor the mysterious She- 
 china, or Glory of God, in the Holy of Holies, nor the tables of stone 
 written by the finger of God, nor the ancient Book of the Law, handed 
 down from the great lawgiver, Moses. The spirit of prophecy was no longer 
 granted ; the Urim and Thummim no longer shone out mysterious oracles 
 from the breast of the high priest, and the holy anointing oil, that had 
 been handed do^vn, as the Rabbis taught, from the days of Aaron, had 
 been lost. There could thus be no consecration of the high priest, or his 
 humbler brethren, by tliat symbol which above all others had been most 
 sacred — the priestly anointing. The priests were now set apart to their 
 office only by solemnly clothing them with their official robes, though the 
 subordinate acts of sacrifice and offering were no doubt continued. The 
 rise of the Synagogue, and the supreme importance attached to the study 
 of the Law, tended also to throw the office of the priest into the back- 
 ground. In the centuries after the Return, the Rabbi became the fore- 
 most figure in Jewish histoi-y. Yet the priest was a necessary appendage 
 to the Temple, and even the traditions of the past lent him office dignity. 
 
 The services at the Temple in Jerusalem, where alone sacrifices could 
 be offered, were entrusted to the care of each course in rotation, for a week 
 of six days and two Sabbaths, and, hence, the members of each, Avhose 
 ministrations might be required, had to go up to Jerusalem twice a-year. 
 
 As the office was hereditary, the number of the priesthood had
 
 56 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 become very great in the days of our Lord, so that, according to the 
 Talmud, in addition to those who lived in the country, and came up to take 
 their turn in the Temple services, there were no fewer than 24,000 settled 
 in Jerusalem, and half that number in Jericho. This, however, is no 
 doubt an exaggeration. Josephus is more likely correct in estimating 
 the whole number at somewhat over 20,000. But even this was an enor- 
 mous proportion of clergy to the population of a country like Judea, as the 
 name was then applied, — a district of about 100 miles in length, and sixty 
 in breadth, or as nearly as possible of the same number of square miles 
 as Yorkshire. They must have been a more familiar sight in the streets 
 of Jerusalem, and of the towns and villages, than the seemingly count- 
 less ecclesiastics in the towns and cities of Spain or Italy at this time. 
 
 The social position, as Avell as official standing, of such a large order 
 necessarily varied greatly. First in consideration, after the high priest 
 came his acting deputy, or assistant — the Sagan — and those who had filled 
 that office, and the heads or presidents of the twenty-four courses — collec- 
 tively, the " high priests," or " chief priests," of Josephus and the New 
 Testament ; and next, the large body of officiating priests, the counterpart 
 of our working clergy. But there were, besides, large numbers, like the 
 lower priests of Russia or Italy, uneducated, who were the object of con- 
 tempt, from their ignorance of the Law, in the Rabbinical sense. The 
 countless sacrifices and offerings, with the multiplied forms to be observed 
 in connection with them, which were settled by the strictest rules, required 
 a knowledge at once minute and extensive, which could only be attained 
 by assiduous and long-continued labour. Hence, it is no wonder that 
 there were many priests who knew little beyond the rites in which they 
 had to take part. The priesthood was thus divided into " the learned " 
 — or those who knew and observed the countless laws of ceremonial clean- 
 ness, and the endless ritual enforced — and " common priests." There 
 were others, doubtless in large numbers, whom some physical defect, or 
 other cause, disqualified from public ministrations, though they retained a 
 right to their share of the offerings. 
 
 The great mass of the order must have been poor in the days of Christ, 
 Avhich were certainly in no way higher in tone than those of Malachi, when 
 blind, and torn, and lame, and sick beasts were offered for sacrifice, so that 
 the priest as well as the altar suffered ; and " the whole nation " withheld 
 their tithes and offerings. The higher ranks of the priesthood — rich and 
 haughty — contributed to tlie degradation of their poorer brethren, whom 
 they des23ised, oppressed, and plundered. Nor was the general character 
 of the priesthood unaffected by the corrviption of the times ; as a class, they 
 were blind guides of the blind. Not a few, however, in so numerous a 
 body, must have retained more or less religious sensibility, for we find that 
 many even of the members of the Jerusalem Council were so alive to the 
 corruption of the hierarchy at large, that they believed on Christ, its great 
 antagonist, and a large number of priests, shortly after His crucifixion, 
 openly joined His disciples. But the evil was deep-rooted and widely 
 spread, and the corruption and demoralization of the order, especially in 
 its higher ranks, grew more and more complete. The high society of
 
 BIRTH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 57 
 
 Jerusalem was mainly comprised in a circle of governing priestly families, 
 and tlieir example tainted the whole priesthood. 
 
 The pride, the violence, irreligion, and luxury of this ecclesiastical 
 aristocracy already, at the beginning of our era, pointed to the excesses 
 they erelong reached. After the banishment of Archelaus, in the early 
 childhood of our Lord, the government became an aristocracy — the high 
 priests virtually ruling the nation — under the Romans. Under Herod and 
 his son, they had been mere puppets, elevated to their dignity for their 
 proved subserviency] to their royal masters. Under Agrippa II., ladies 
 bought the high priesthood for their husbands for so much money. 
 Martha, daughter of Bocthus, one of these simoniacs, when she went 
 to see her husband, spread carpets from her door to the gate of the 
 Temple. The high priests themselves were ashamed of their most 
 sacred functions. The having to preside over the sacrifices was thought 
 by some so repulsive and degrading, that they wore silk gloves when 
 officiating, to keep their hands from touching the victims. Given to 
 gluttony — the special vice of their Roman masters — they also, like them, 
 abandoned themselves to luxury, and oppressed the poor, to obtain the 
 means for indulgence. Thoroiighly heathen in feeling, they courted the 
 favour of the Romans, who repaid them by rich places for their sons ; and 
 they openly robbed and oppressed the poor priests suppoi'ted by the people, 
 going the length of violence in doing so. Josephus tells us that they even 
 sent their sei'vants to the threshing-floors, and took away by force the 
 tithes that belonged to the priests, beating those who resisted, and that 
 thus not a few poorer priests died for want. 
 
 Yet the office of the priest, in itself, was the highest in Jewish society, 
 and the whole order formed a national aristocracy, however poor and 
 degraded many of its members might be. Every priest was the lineal 
 descendant of a priestly ancestry running back to Aaron ; and as the wives 
 of the order were generally chosen from within its families, this lofty 
 pedigree in many cases marked both parents. 
 
 The law fixed no certain age at which the young priest should enter on 
 his office, though the Rabbis maintain that he needed to be at least twenty, 
 since David had appointed that age for the Levites. As in corrupt ages 
 of the Church, however, this wholesome rule was not always observed, for 
 Josephiis tells us that Herod made Aristobulus high priest when he was 
 Beventeen, and we read of common priests wliose beards wei'c only begin- 
 ning to grow. 
 
 The special consecration of the young priest began while he was yet only 
 a lad. As soon as the down appeared on his cheek he had to appear before 
 the council of the Temple, that his genealogy might be inspected. If it 
 proved faulty, he left the Temple clad in black, and had to seek another 
 calling : if it satisfied the council, a further ordeal awaited him. There 
 were 140 bodily defects, any one of which would incapacitate him from 
 sacred duties, and he was now carefully inspected to discover if ho were 
 free from them. If he had no blemish of any kind, the white tunic of a 
 priest was given him, and he began his official life in its humbler duties, 
 as a training for higher responsibilities in after years.
 
 58 THE LIFE 0¥ CHRIST. 
 
 Ordination, oi- rather the formal consecration, followed, when the priest 
 attained the legal age. For this, mnch more was necessary, in theory, 
 than freedom from bodily blemish. The candidate must be of blameless 
 character, though, in such an age, this, no doubt, was little considered. 
 
 The ceremony, as originally prescribed, was imposing. The neophyte 
 was first washed before the sanctuaiy, as a typical cleansing, and then 
 clothed in his robe. His head was next anointed with holy oil, and then 
 his priestly turban was put on him. A young ox was now slain as a sin- 
 offering, the priest putting his hands upon its head ; then a ram followed, 
 as a whole burnt oiJering, and after that, a second ram as an offering of con- 
 secration, and this was the crowning feature in the rite. Some of the warm 
 blood of the victim was put on the right ear, the right thumb, and the 
 right great toe of the candidate, to show his complete consecration to the ser- 
 vice of Jehovah. He was then spriidcled with the blood flowing from the 
 altar, and with the holy oil, as if to convey to him their purifying virtues, and 
 transform him into another man. This sprinkling was the sign of com- 
 pleted consecration ; he was now a priest. The pieces of the ram for the 
 altar, with the meat-offering that accompanied them, were jiut into his 
 hands, to show that he could, henceforth, himself prepare what was needed 
 for the altar services. Having laid them on the altar, other ceremonies 
 followed. The pieces of the sacrifice usually given to the priest were con- 
 sumed as a special sin-offering, and with their burning on the altar the 
 installation into office ended. The first day, however, did not close the 
 ceremonies. The same sacrifices offered on this day were required to be 
 repeated on each of the seven days folloy>fing, that the solemnity of the 
 act might be felt by all. It had been thus in the early and glorious days 
 of the priesthood, but how many of these ceremonies were observed under 
 the second Temple is not known. 
 
 The official dress of a priest, like that of the priests of ancient Egypt, 
 was of white linen. On his head he wore a kind of turban in his ministra- 
 tions, reverence demanding that he should not enter the presence of 
 Jehovah uncovered, and for the same reason his feet were left bare, the 
 ground on which he stood, in the near vision of the Almighty, being holy. 
 The full official dress was worn only in the Temple, and was kept there by 
 a special guardian, when the ininistrations ended for the time. In private 
 life a simpler dress was worn ; but whether in his service at the Temple 
 or at his house, he was still a priest, even to the eye. The richly orna. 
 mented dress of the high priest — the " golden vestment," as it was called 
 by the Eabbis — was, of course, much more costly than that of his brethren, 
 and passed down from one high priest to another. It marks the character 
 of the times that, under the Romans, it was kept in their hands, and only 
 given out to the high priest, for use, when needed. 
 
 The duties of the priests were many and various. It was their awful 
 and peculiar honour to " come near the Lord.'' None but they could 
 minister before Him, in the Holy Place where He manifested His presence : 
 none others could " come nigh the vessels of the sanctuary or the altar." 
 It was death for any one not a priest to usurp these sacred prerogatives, 
 They offered the morning and evening incense ; trimmed the lamps of the
 
 BIRTH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 59 
 
 golden candlestick, and filled them with oil ; set out the shewbread weeklj^ ; 
 kept up the fire on the great altar in front of the Temple; rem.OYed the 
 ashes of the sacrifices ; took part in the slaying and cutting up of victims, 
 and especially in the sprinkling of their blood; and laid the offerings of 
 all kinds on the altar. They also announced the new moons, which were 
 sacred days, like the Sabbaths, by the blowing of trumpets. But this was 
 a small part of their duties. They had to examine all cases of ceremonial 
 ancleanness, especially leprosy, clearing those who were pure, and pro- 
 nouncing others unclean ; to estimate, for commutation, the value of the 
 countless offerings vowed to the Temple, and to watch the interior of the 
 Temple by night. They were required, moreover, to instruct the people 
 in the niceties of the Law, and to give decisions on many points reserved, 
 among us, to magistrates. The priests, in fact, were, within certain limits, 
 the judges and magistrates of the land, though the Sanhedrim, which was 
 the supreme court in later Jewish history, was composed of chief priests, 
 laymen, and scribes, or Rabbis, in apparently equal numbers. 
 
 It was necessary that an officiating priest should be in every point 
 ceremonially " clean " during his period of duty, for a priest who was not 
 " clean " covild not enter the Temj^le. A wise law prohibited his tasting 
 wine or strong drink during the term of his service. The demonstrations 
 of grief common to the nation were unlawful in him ; he must not rend 
 his garments, or cut himself, or shave his beard or head, whatever befell 
 him or his. Contact with the dead was to be carefully shunned as a 
 defilement. 
 
 The same ideal purity, as of one holy to the Lord, marked the laws of 
 the priest's marriage, for he could only marry a virghi, or a widow who 
 had not been divorced, and she must be a joure Israelite lawfully born. 
 The daughters of priests were held in special honour, and marriage of 
 priests with theiu was in high favour. A priest, says Josephus, must 
 marry a wife of his own nation, without having any regard to money, or 
 other dignities ; but he is to make a scrutiny, and take his wife's genealogy 
 from the ancient records, and procure many witnesses to it, iust as his 
 own had been carefully tested before his consecration. An order thus 
 guarded by countless special laws must have been as sacred in the eyes of 
 the multitude as the almost similarly exclusive Brahmins of India. 
 Josephus could make no boast of which he felt so proud as that he 
 belonged to such a sacerdotal nobility. 
 
 Thirteen towns, mostly near Jerusalem, and thus affording easy access 
 to it, when their duties called them to the TemjDle, were assigned to the 
 priests. During their term of service they lived in rooms in the Temple 
 buildings, but they came there alone, leaving their households behind them. 
 
 For the support of the order, provision had been made from the earliest 
 times, by assigning them part of the various tithes paid by the people ; 
 fees for the redemption of the first-born of man or beast, and in commuta- 
 tion of vows, and what may be called the perquisites of their office— the 
 shewbread, heave-offerings, parts of the sacrifices, the first-fruits of corn, 
 wine, and oil, and other things of the same kind. Officiating priests were 
 thus secured in moderate comfort, if they received a fair proportion of
 
 00 TJIJ'] LIFK OF CIllilST. 
 
 thoir duos, and the wholo order Imd, besides, the gi-oat advantage of 
 fi'tHMloiu I'roin any tax, and from niilitnry service. 
 
 Aiiioiiti^ lli(> incinltiM's (>r Miis sacred caste luiiiislciiui^ in (lie 'i"eiii|)l(>, in 
 \]\o autuimi (it the si\(ii jcar liel'iire I, lint willi wlileli (lie ('hristian erii, as 
 iMiuinonly reckoni'd, comnu^ncos, was one wlin iia<I eoiue up, appareiil 1 y, 
 I'l-oni Hebron, lie was now an cldcM'ly man, iiiiil had hit beliind him, at 
 home, a chihUess wil'e I^Ibsabeth by name like liiniseir, advanced in 
 years. 'I'lie two weri> in tiie ruUest sense "Isi-aebles in(h'ed : " tlieii' 
 family records bad established their common descent from Aaron, and their 
 lives proved th(>ir lol'ly realization of the na-tit)nal i'aitb, for " tlioy Aver(\ 
 both, righteous bi'I'ore (lod, walking in all the commamlmenta and ordin- 
 ances of the Lord bhuneh^ss." 
 
 lint, notwithstaiuling all the satisfaction and inward ])eaoo of innocent 
 and godly lives, in spite ol' the natural pride tlu>3', donbtles.s, felt in tlio 
 consitleration that must have been shown IIumu, as born of a jiriestly 
 ancestry, strotcliing back through fifteen bnndri'd years, and though th(>y 
 must have had around theni the coml'orts of a nuulest compel ency, there 
 was a secret griel' in the heart of both, iilisabeth had no child, and what 
 this meant to a Ifebrew wife it is hard for ns to fancy. Rachel's Avords, 
 "(Jive me cliildr(Mi, or elso I die," were the biinlen of every childless 
 woman's heart in Israel. The birth of a child was the removal of a 
 r(>pr(KU'li. Hannah's i)rayer for a son was that of all Jewish wives in the 
 same position. 'I'o have no child was regai'ded as a heavy punishment 
 from the hand of (.'od. Ifow bitter the thought that his name should 
 piM-ish was for a^ Jew to i)ear, is seen in the law Avhich required that a 
 childless widow should be, forthwith, mai'ried by a dead husband's bi'other, 
 that children might be raised up to preserve the nuMuory of th(> childless 
 man, by being accounted his. Nor was it enough that one brother of a 
 nnnd)er acted thus : in the imaginary instance given by the Sadducees to 
 our Lord, seven brothers, in succession, look a dead brother's wife for 
 this object. The birth of a child was tluMvfore a. spcH'ial blessing, as a 
 security that the name of his father "should not be cut oif from anumg 
 his brethren, and from the gate of his phu^e," and that it should not be 
 "put out of Israel." Ancient nations, generally, seem to have luid this 
 fiH'ling. and it is still so strong among Orientals, that after the biitb of 
 a lirst-b(n"n son, a father and a mother are no h)uger known by their own 
 names, but as the father and mother of the child. There was, besides, a 
 higher thought of possible relations, however distant, to the great 
 expected Messiah, by the birth of children; but Zacharias and Elisabeth 
 had reason enough to sorrow at their childless home, even on the humbler 
 ground of natural sentiments. They had grieved over their nnsfortune, 
 and had nuido it the burden of many prayers ; but years passed, and they 
 had both grown elderly, and yet no child had been vouchsafed them. 
 
 The autumn service of the course of AI)ia had taken Zacharias to 
 Jerusalem, and his week of Temple duty was ])assing. As a nunistcMang 
 priest he had a chamber in the cloisters that ran along the sidc^s of the 
 outer Temple court. His office took him day by day, in his white ollicial 
 vobcs, totlie feurtli and inmost space, immediately beside the sanctr.ary
 
 ] IllTII OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 61 
 
 itself, a part into wliicli none could enter but priests wearing their sacred 
 garments. This court rose above three other spaces, all, in succession, 
 lower — the court of the men, that of the women, and that of foreigners 
 who had become .Jews — each, separated from the other by marble walls 
 or balustrades, and approached only by great gates, famous throughout the 
 world for their magnificence. Above, in the central space, stood the 
 sanctuary, springing from a level fifteen steps higher than the court of 
 the Israelites, next, below it, and thus visible from all parts, as the crown 
 and glory of the whole terraced structure. It was built of blocks of fine 
 white marble, each about 37 feet in length, 12 in height, and 18 in breadth, 
 the courses which formed the foundations measuring, in some cases, the 
 Ftill huger size of 70 feet in length, 9 in width, and 8 in height. The 
 whole area enclosed within the Temple bounds formed a square of 600 or 
 900 feet, and over the highest level of this rose the gilded walls of the 
 Banctuary, a Vjuilding, perhaps, about 150 feet long by 90 broad, with two 
 wings or shoulders of '30 feet each, on a line with the facade, the whole 
 surmounted by a roof glittering with gilded spikes, to prevent pollution 
 from above by unclean birds alighting on it. 
 
 When it is remembered that the natural surface of the hill on which 
 these amazing structures were built was altogether too contracted and 
 Bteep to supply the level space needed, the grandeur of the architecture as 
 a whole will be even more apparent. The plateau of the successive courts 
 was only secured by building up a Avail from the valley beneath, to the 
 height required, and this, on the south side, required a solid mass of 
 masonry about 600 feet in length, and almost equal in height to the tallest 
 of our church spires, while on the top of an erection so unequalled, rose 
 the magnificent Royal Porch, a building longer and higher than York 
 Cathedral. No wonder Josephus calls such a wall "the most prodigious 
 work ever heard of," nor that its surpassing magnificence, in these yeai's, 
 when its dazzling whiteness shone fresh from the masons' hands, should 
 have gone abroad to all countries. 
 
 The sanctuary itself was divided into tAvo unequal parts ^the Holy and 
 the Holy of Holies. Before the porch stood the great altar for burnt 
 offerings, with rows of rings, — to which the beasts for sacrifice were tied, 
 — sunk in the pavement, near, — while a line of cedar beams, resting on 
 eight low pillars, gave the priests the means of hanging up the slaughtered 
 victims, to dress them for the altar. The Holy of Holies, the inmost 
 division of the sanctuary, was left an awful solitude throughout the year, 
 except on the great Day of Atonement, on which the high priest entered it 
 alone. In the Temple standing in Christ's day it was entirely empty, 
 unless, indeed, the tradition of the Mischna be correct, that a stone stood 
 in it, instead of the long-lost Ark of the Covenant, as a spot on which the 
 high priest could rest his censer. Great gates, plated with gold, shut in 
 this awful cliamber, and a thick veil of Babylonian tapestry, in Avhich blue 
 and scarlet and purple were woven into a fabric of matchless beauty and 
 enormous value — the veil that was afterwards rent in twain at the time of 
 the crucifixion — hung before it, dividing it from the Holy Place, and 
 shutting out all light from its mysterious depths.
 
 62 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 The entrance to tlie Holy Place was by two doors, of vast height and 
 breadth, covered with plates of gold, as was the whole front on each side 
 of them, over a breadth of thirty feet, and a height of fully a hundred and 
 thirty. The upper part, over the gates, which remained always open, was 
 covered by an ornamentation of great golden vines, from which hung 
 clusters of grapes the length of a man's stature. No wonder Josephus 
 adds that such a front wanted nothing that could give an idea of splen- 
 dour, since the plates of gold, of great weight, as he adds, reflected the 
 rays of the morning sun with a dazzling brightness, from which the eyes 
 turned away overpowered. When the gates of the Holy Place were 
 opened, all was seen as far as the inner veil, and all glittered with a 
 surface of beaten gold. 
 
 In the Holy Place stood only three things : the golden candlestick with 
 its seven lamps, in allusion to the seven planets ; the table of shewbread ; 
 and between them, the altar of incense. In the entrance, which was 
 merely the open fore-half of the sanctuary, and, like the rest of the front, 
 was covered with plates of gold, stood two tables, one of marble, the other 
 of gold, on which the priests, at their entering or coming out of the Holy 
 Place, laid the old shewbread and the new. Before the entrance, in the 
 court of the priests, stood the great altar of burnt offering, of unhewn 
 stone, which no tool had touched, and the brazen laver, in which the 
 priests washed their hands and feet before beginning their ministrations. 
 
 " In the morning," says Josephus, " at the opening of the inner temple," 
 that is, of the court of the priests, " those who are to officiate, receive the 
 sacrifices, as they do again at noon. It is not lawful to carry any vessel 
 into the holy house. When the days are over in which a course of priests 
 officiates, other priests succeed in the performance of the sacrifices, and 
 assemble together at mid-day and receive the keys of the Temple, and the 
 vessels." Among the various priestly duties none was of such esteem as 
 the offering of incense. The heat of eastern and southern countries, by 
 its unpleasant physical effects, doubtless first led to the practice of burn- 
 ing odorous substances, though luxury and mere indulgence soon adopted 
 it. Ultimately, not only chambers, clothes, and furniture were thus per- 
 fumed, but the beards and whole persons of guests, in great houses, at 
 their coming and leaving. Burning censers were waved before princes, 
 and altars, on which incense was burned, were raised before them in the 
 streets, when they entered towns or cities. Thus esteemed a mark of the 
 highest honour, the custom was early transferred to religious worship, in 
 the belief that the Deity delighted in the odours thus offered. Hence it 
 became a part of the recognised worship of Jehovah, the Mosaic law re- 
 quiring incense to be burnt on the altar with many offerings. A daily 
 incense offering morning and evening, on a special altar, in the Holy 
 Place, at the times of trimming and kindling the sacred lamps, was also 
 ordained, and another yearly, in the Holy of Holies, by the high priest, on 
 the great Day of Atonement. 
 
 The daily incense offering required the ministration of two priests, one 
 of whom bore the incense in a special vessel ; the other, glowing embers 
 in a golden fire-pan, from the altar of burnt sacrifice before the entrance 
 of the Holy Place, and these he spread on an altar within. The fi.rst
 
 EIRTn OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. 63 
 
 priest then sprinkled tbe incense on the Ijurning coals, an office held so 
 honourable that no one was allowed to perform it twice, since it brought 
 the offering priest nearer the Divine Pi-esence in the Holy of Holies than 
 any other priestly act, and carried with it the richest blessing from on 
 high, which all ought to have a chance of thus obtaining. Like the rest 
 of the sacred functions, it was determined daily by lot. 
 
 During the burning of the incense, each morning and night, the 
 worshipjiers in the different courts remained in silent prayer, their faces 
 towards the holy spot where the .symbol of their devotions was ascending 
 in fragrant clouds towards heaven : their fondest hope being that their 
 prayer might rise up, odorous and well-pleasing like it, towards Jehovah, 
 While the priests entered, morning and evening, into the Holy Place, with 
 its seven lamps burning night and day for ever, the memento of the awful 
 presence in the pillar of fire that had guarded them of old, and its table 
 of " continual bread " of the presence — a male lamb, with the due fruit 
 and drink-offering connected with such a sacrifice, was ready to be offered 
 on the great altar of burnt offering outside. The atoning sacrifice, and 
 the clouds of incense, the outward symbol of the prayers of the people, 
 were thus indissolubly associated, and so holy were they in all eyes, that 
 the hours sacred to them were known as those of the morning and the 
 evening sacrifice. They served, still further, to set a time, throughout 
 the Jewish world, for the morning and evening prayers of all Israel, and 
 thus, when the priest stood by the incense altar, and the flame of the burnt 
 offei'ing, outside, ascended, the prayers offered in the Temple courts were 
 repeated all over the land, and even in every region, however distant, to 
 wliich a godly Jew had wandered. 
 
 On the day when our narrative opens, the lot for the daily incense offer- 
 ing had fallen on Zacharias. In his white sacerdotal robes, with covered 
 head and naked feet, at the tinkling of the bell which announced that the 
 morning or evening sacrifice was about to be laid on the great altar, 
 he entered the Holy Place, that the clouds of incense, which symbolized 
 Israel's prayers, might herald the way for the smoke of the victim pre- 
 sently to be burned in their stead. In a place so sacred, separated only 
 by a veil from the Holy of Holies, the awful presence chamber of the 
 Almighty — a place where God had already shown that He was near, by 
 human words to the oSiciating priest — at a moment so solemn, when 
 it had fallen to him to enjoy an awful honour which most of his brethren 
 could not expect to obtain, and which could never be repeated, he must 
 have been well-nigh overpowered with emotion. At the tinkling of the 
 bell all the priests and Lcvites took their stations through the Temple 
 courts, and he and liis helper began their ministrations. 
 
 And now the coals arc laid on the altar, the helping priest retires, and 
 Zacharias is left alone with the mysterious, ever-burning lamps, and the 
 glow of the altar which was believed to have been kindled, at first, from 
 the pillar of fire in the desert, and to have been kept unquenched, by 
 miracle, since then. He pours the incense on the flames, and its fragrance 
 rises in clouds, which are the symbol of the prayers of Israel, now rising
 
 G4 THE LIFE GF CHRIST. 
 
 over all the earth. As the intercessor for his people, for the time, he, too, 
 joins his supplications. 
 
 We need not question what the burden of that prayer must have been, 
 with one, who, like him, " waited for the Consolation of Israel," and 
 " looked for Eedemption." It was, doubtless, that the sins of the nation, 
 his own sins, and the sins of his household, might be forgiven ; that 
 Jehovah would accept the atonement of the lamb presently to burn on the 
 great altar in their stead ; and that the long-expected Hope of Israel, the 
 Messiah foretold by prophets, might soon appear. 
 
 While he prays, there stands a mysterious Presence before him, on the 
 right side of the altar, the side of good omen, as the angels, afterwards, 
 appeared at the right side, in the Holy Sepulchre, and as Christ was seen, 
 Ijy the martyr Stephen, standing on the Right Hand of God. No wonder 
 he was alarmed at such a sight, in such a place. Fear of the supernatural 
 is instinctive. In the history of his own nation, which Zacharias, like 
 every Jew, knew so well, Jacob had held it a wonder that he had, as he 
 believed, seen God face to face, and that his life was preserved; Jehovah 
 Himself had hidden Moses in a cleft of the rock, that he might see the 
 divine glory only after it had passed by, " For no man," He had said, 
 " shall see Me and live." The stout-hearted Gideon had trembled at the 
 sight of an angel ; Manoah had expected to die after a similar vision ; 
 and when Daniel saw the very angel now before Zacharias " there re- 
 mained no strength in him." 
 
 But Gabriel had come on a mission befitting the world from which he 
 had Ijeen sent. The hour had arrived when the prayer which Zacharias, 
 and those like him, had so long raised, shou.ld be heard. The Messiah 
 was about to be revealed, and the faithful priest who had so longed for 
 His appearing would be honoured by a relationship to Him. He had for 
 many a year desired a son : not only would his wish be granted, at last, 
 but the sou to be born would be the prophet, long announced, to go before 
 the Expected One, to prepare His way. He need not fear : he who speaks 
 is Gabriel, the archangel, who stands in the presence of God, and as one 
 who thus always beholds the face of the Great Father in heaven, he has 
 a tender love to His children on earth. Had Zacharias thought how the 
 skies rejoice at a sinner's repenting ; how the angels are always near us 
 when we pray ; how they bear our prayers into the presence of God ; 
 and how, at last, they guide the souls of the just to everlasting joy ; he 
 would have rejoiced even while he trembled. 
 
 But the heart is slow to receive the access of any sudden joy, and to lay 
 aside disappointment. Tlie tbought rises in the heart of Zacharias that 
 the glad tidings of the birth of the Messiah may well be true ; but, as to 
 the son promised to his wife, stricken in years as she now is, can it be 
 possible ? A sudden dumbness, imposed at the angel's word, at once 
 rebukes his doubt, and confirms his faith. 
 
 Meanwhile, the multitude, without, wondered at the delay in his re- 
 appearance, to bless and dismiss them. The priest's coming out of the 
 sanctuary was the signal for the lamb being laid on the altar, and was a
 
 LIRTH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. C5 
 
 moment of passing interest in Jcv^'isli worsliip. A passage in that noble 
 relic of pre-Christian Jewish literature, Ecclesiasticns, respecting the 
 great patriot high priest, Simon the Just, brings a similar scene, though 
 on a far grander scale, on the great Day of Atonement, vividly before us. 
 The crowds now around marked some other than a common day, and we 
 need only tone down the picture to suit it to the present case ; for 
 Zacharias, as a faithful priest, engaged on such a service, was, for the 
 time, an object of almost sacred reverence. 
 
 " How glorious was he," says the Son of Sirach, " before the multitude 
 o£ the people, in his coming forth from within the veil ! He was as the 
 morning star in the midst of a cloud, and as the moon when its days are 
 full ; as the sun shining upon the temple of the Most High, and as the 
 rainbow that glitters on the bright clouds, and as the flower of roses 
 in the spring of the year ; as lilies bj' the rivers of waters, and as the 
 branches of the frankincense tree in the time of summer. . . . 
 
 " AVhen he put on the robes of state, and was arrayed in all his orna- 
 ments, when he w^cnt up to the holy altar, he adorned the fore-coui't of the 
 Sanctuary. But when he received the pieces of the sacrifice from the 
 hands of the priests, and stood at the side of the altar, a crown of brethren 
 round him, then was he like the young cedar on Lebanon, and they were 
 round him like palm-trees, and all the sons of Aaron were in their splendid 
 robes, and the gifts for the Lord in their hands, from the whole congre- 
 gation of Israel. And, when he had finished the service at the altars, 
 that he might do honour to the offering of the Most High, Almighty, he 
 stretched forth his hand over the sacrifice, and poured out the blood of 
 grapes ; he poured it out at the foot of the altar, as a sweet-smelling 
 savour unto the Most High, the King of all. Then shouted the sons of 
 Aaron ; with the silver trumpets of wondrous jvorkmanship did they 
 sound, and made a great noise to be heard, for a remembrance before the 
 Most High. Then all the people, together, hasted, and fell down to the 
 earth, upon their faces, to worship God, the Lord Almighty, the Most 
 High. The singers also sang praises with their voices; with great variety 
 of sounds was there made sweet melody. And the people besought the 
 Lord, the Most High, by jjrayer before Him that is merciful, till the 
 glorious exalting of the Lord was ended, and His worship was finished. 
 
 *' Then he came down, and lifted up his hands over the whole congrega- 
 tion of the children of Israel, to give the blessing of the Lord with his 
 lips, aiad to glorify His name. And they bowed themselves down to 
 worship the second time, that they might receive a blessing from the 
 Most High." 
 
 Fear lest any calamity might have befallen Zacharias added to the 
 rising excitement. He might have been ceremonially unclean, and the 
 divine anger at the Holy Place being thus polluted, might have struck 
 him down. The offering priest never reinained longer than was necessary 
 in so august a Presence. His appearance, at last, however, explained all. 
 They could receive no blessing that day, and Zacharias could no longer 
 minister in his course, for he was speechless ; all he could do was to tell 
 them by signs what had happened. Had they known it, his silence for
 
 6'6 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 the time was but the prelude to the lastuig silence o^ the^ Law, of which 
 he was a minister, now that Christ was about to come. 
 
 Having no niore to detain him at Jerusalem, Zacharias returned home, 
 we presume, to Hebron. His journey, if it was in October, as seems 
 likely, would lead him through the cheerful scenes of the grape harvest — 
 a great event, even yet, in the Hebron district. Had it been in April, at 
 the "spring service, the stony hills, and deep red or yellov/ soil of the 
 valleys through which he had to pass, would have been ablaze with bright 
 colours ; shrubs, grass, gay weeds, and wild-ilowers, over all the uplands, 
 and thickets, of varied blossom, sprinkled with sheets of white briar roses, 
 in the hollows ; the beautiful cyclamen peeping from under the gnarled 
 roots of great trees, and from amidst the roadside stones. Towns of stone 
 houses, of which the ruins still remain, rose. Hat-roofed, from the hill- 
 sides, or from their tops, in sight of each other, all the way. Fields with 
 stone walls, now, in the autumn, lay idle after the harvest, or were being 
 re-sown ; but the vineyards, which spread far and wide, over valley and 
 sloping height, resounded with voices, for the houses were well-nigh 
 forsaken to gather the ripe grapes. Somewhere in Hebron, in its cradle 
 of hills, three thousand feet above the neighbouring Mediterranean, lay 
 the home of Zacharias, and there, some time in the next year, in accord- 
 ance with the promise of the angel, Elisabeth bore a son — the future 
 Baptist ; and Zacharias received back his speech, on the glad day of the 
 child getting its name, — -the eighth after its birth, — the day of its 
 admission into the congregation of Israel by circumcision. 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 THE ANNOUNCEMENT 10 JIAKY. 
 
 "TTTHILE Zacharias and Elisabeth were rejoicing at their promised 
 ' ' blessing, in their quiet home in the south, there lived in the village 
 of IlTazareth or Nazara, over a hundred miles to the north of them, a Jew 
 of the name of Joseph, and a simple maiden named Mary, who was be- 
 trothed to him as his future wife. Though humble enough in position — • 
 for he was by trade a carpenter — ^Joseph was, in reality, of the noblest 
 blood of his race, for he could claim descent from the ancient kings of his 
 nation, and was the legal heir to tlie throne of David and Solomon. 
 
 It need nob surprise us that the representative of such an illustrious 
 ancestry should be found in a station so obscure. In the Book of 
 Judges, we find a grandson of Moses reduced to engage himself as family 
 priest, in Mount Ephraim, for a yearly wage often shekels, a suit of 
 apparel, and his victuals." At the present day, the green tui'bau Avhich 
 marks descent from Mahomet is often worn in the East by the very poor, 
 and even by beggars. In our own history, the glory of the once illustrious 
 Plantagenets so completely waned, that the direct representative of 
 Margaret Plantagenet, daughter and heiress of George Duke of Clarence, 
 followed the trade of cobbler in ISTewporfc, Sliropshirc, in 1037. Amono'
 
 THE ANNOUNCEMENT TO MARY. 67 
 
 the lineal descendants of Edmund of Woodstock, sixtli son of Ed'5\'ard I., 
 and entitled to quarter the royal arms, wore a village butcher, and a 
 keeper of a turnpike gate, and among the descendants of Thomas Planta- 
 genet, Duke of Gloucester, fifth son of Edward III., was included the late 
 sexton of a London church. The vicissitudes of the Jewish nation for 
 century after century ; its deportation to Babylon, and long suspension of 
 national life ; its succession of high-priestly rulers, after the return ; its 
 transition to the Asmonean line, and, finally, the reign of the Idumcan 
 house of Herod, with all the storm and turmoil which marked so many 
 changes, had left, to use the figure of Isaiah, only a root in a dry ground, 
 a humble citizen of Nazareth, as the heir of its ancient roj'alty. 
 
 In the same city lived a family, Avhich, like that of Joseph, seems to have 
 been long settled there. The names of the parents we do not know, but 
 they had three daughters, one of whom, Mary, was betrothed to Joseph. 
 The relation thus created was familiar to oiir own ancestors as late as the 
 time of Shakespere, and was equivalent to a civil contract of marriage, 
 to be duly followed by the religious rite. Among the Jews of Mary's day, 
 it was even more of an actual engagement. The betrothal was formally 
 made, with rejoicings, in the house of the bride, under a tent or slight 
 canopy raised for the purpose. It was called the "making sacred," as 
 the bride, thenceforth, was sacred to her husband, in the strictest sense. 
 To make it legal, the bridegroom gave his betrothed a piece of money, or 
 the worth of it, before witnesses, with the words, " Lo, thou art betrothed 
 unto me," or by a formal writing, in which similar words, and the maiden's 
 name, were given, and this, in tlie same way, was handed to her before 
 witnesses. Betrothals were commonly arranged by the fathers, or in case 
 of their being dead, by the mothers, or guardians, and the consent of any 
 brothers the maiden might have was required. In the earlier ages, verbal 
 agreements, sometimes confirmed by oath, before witnesses, were most in 
 use, but after the Return, written forms became the rule. 
 
 Though boti'othal was virtually marriage, and conld only be broken off 
 by a formal " bill of divorcement," the betrothed did not at once go to her 
 husband's house. To give her time for preparation, and to soften the pain of 
 parting from her friends, or, perhaps, in part, to let thfem get a longer benefit 
 of her household services, an interval elapsed before the final ceremony ; 
 it migiit be so many weeks, or months, or even a whole year. 
 
 It was now the sixth month from the appearance of Gabriel to Zachaaris, 
 and Mary's time of betrothal was passing quickly away in her family home 
 at Nazareth. The future Herald Iiad been pointed out, and now the advent 
 of the Messiah Himself vfas to be announced, as silently, and with as little 
 notice from men ; for Christ, like the sun, rose in noiseless stillness. 
 
 A heart like that of Mary, full of religious thoughtfulness and emotion, 
 must have been doubly earnest in the daily devotions which no Jew or 
 Jewess neglected. Like all her people, the time of the morning offering, 
 the hour of noon, and the time of the evening sacrifice, would find her in 
 her private chamber in lowly prayer. At some such moment, the great 
 event took place of which the narrative of St. Luke informs us. 
 
 In the sixth month, we are told, after the visit to Zacharias, Gabriel
 
 68 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 was sent from God to Mary, and having entered her chamljcr, -vvhcrc the 
 presence of a man must have been startling at any time, bnt then especially, 
 — stood before her with the usual salutation, to wliich he added the 
 mysterious words, that she was highly favoured, and that the Lord was 
 Avith her. ISTaturally' troubled by such an interruption and such words, 
 she shows a characteristic of her calm, self-collected nature in being able 
 to think and reason, as if undisturbed, what the salutation might mean. 
 Whatever fear she has, speedily passes, before the soothing words of her 
 visitor. He bids her lay aside her alarm ; he has come to tell her that 
 she has found favour, above all other women, with God, by being chosen 
 as the future mother of the long-expected Messiah, who was to have the 
 name of Jesus. "The Holy Gliost," he says, "shall come upon thee, and 
 the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee ; therefore thy son shall 
 be called the Son of God ; and the Lord God shall give unto Him the 
 throne of His father David ; and He shall reign over the house of 
 Jacob for ever ; and of His kingdom there shall be no end." It would 
 have been no more than human weakness, if doubts had risen at siicli an 
 announcement, but these he sets to rest, if they were springing, by telling 
 her that a miracle, no less wonderful than that which would happen with 
 herself, had already been wrought upon her relative Elisabeth. Mary's 
 answer is the ideal of dignified humility, and meek and reverend innocence : 
 — " Behold the handmaid of the Lord ; be it unto me according to thy 
 word." And presently she was alone. 
 
 Had the narrative of the miraculous conception occurred in the literature 
 of a heathen nation, it would justly have raised doubts. But in the sober 
 verses of the Gospels, written by Jews, it takes a far different character. 
 The idea was altogether foreign to the Jewish mind. The Hebrew doctrine 
 of the Unity of God, and of the infinite elevation of the Divine Being above 
 man, the profound regard of the Jews for the married state, and their ab- 
 horrence of unwedded life, make it impossible to imagine how such a 
 thought could ever have risen among them. The improbability of its 
 being invented by a Jew is heightened by the fact that, though lofty thoughts 
 of the nature of the Messiah were not wanting in some Israelites, the 
 almost universal belief was that He was to be simply a man, who 
 Avould receive miraculous endowments on His formal consecration as 
 Messiah. 
 
 AVhat best to do in a position so mysterious may well have trouljled 
 Mary's heart. The angel had told her that her relative Elisabeth, as well 
 as herself, had been favoui'ed of God in connection with the expected 
 Messiah, and it is a natural trait, in one whose strength of mind, and calm 
 decision of character, had shown itself even in her Yisitation, that she now 
 determined to go to her kinswoman and confer with her, though the dis- 
 tance between them was over a hundred miles. 
 
 What were the thoughts of Mary in her solitary journey — for solitary 
 she must have been, with such a secret in her heart, even if she travelled 
 with a company ? She likely went on foot, for it was the custom of her 
 people, and, moreover, she was poor. The intimation made to her was one 
 which she could hardly grasp in its full significance. Her Son was to sit
 
 THE ANNOUNCEMENT TO MARY. G9 
 
 upon the throne of His father David, aucT reign over the house of Jacob, 
 founding a kingdom which should endure for ever. But this was only 
 what she had expected as a Jewess, for, like all her nation, she thought of 
 the Messiah as a Jewish king who should restore the long-lost glories of 
 her race, and make Israel triumphant over all the heathen. She had been 
 told as well, however, that her child, from its birth, should be called the 
 Son of the Highest, and the Son of God. The human mind is slow to 
 grasp great truths, and needs to grow into a comprehension of their mean- 
 ing : it cannot receive them in their fulness till it has been educated, step 
 by step, to understand them. Long years after this she only partially 
 realized the import of such words. In her Son's youth she was perplexed 
 to know what was meant by His answer, when He stayed behind in the 
 Temple ; and years after that she failed, once again, to realize her true rela- 
 tions to Him. Nor does she seem to have risen to the full sublimity of 
 her position, and of His, while He lived, though the deathless love of a 
 mother for her child brought her to the foot of the Cross. But in such 
 slowness to believe, and such abidingly imperfect conceptions, she was 
 only on a footing with those who enjoyed habitual intercourse with Him, 
 hearing His words, and seeing His miracles, day by day ; for even the 
 disciples remained to the end Jewish peasants, in their ideas respecting 
 Him, thinking that He was only a political deliverer of the nation. Pre- 
 occupation of the mind by fixed opinions, leads to a wrong reading of any 
 evidence. We unconsciously distort facts, or invent them, to support our 
 favourite theories, and see everything through their medium, like the 
 musician, who held that God worked six days, and rested on the seventh, 
 because there are seven notes in music; or as in the instance fancied by 
 Helvetius, where a loving couple had no doubt that two objects, visible on 
 the disc of the moon, were t^vo lovers bending towards each other, while a 
 clergyman had as little, that they were the two steeples of a cathedral. 
 Our conclusions are determined largely by our predispositions, and our 
 prejudices, or prejudgments, in great measure monopolize our faculties. 
 We are not so much ignorant as perverted. We see truth through a prism. 
 We are so entirely the creatures of education, of the opinions of our neigh- 
 bours and of our family, and of the thousand influences of life, that the 
 only way we can hope to see truth in its own white and unbroken light is, 
 as Christ tells us, by our becoming little children. With Mary and the 
 disciples this came in the end, but not till then. The influence expressed 
 in Seneca's apophthegm — Sordet cognita Veritas — blinded their eyes, in part, 
 while our Lord was still with them; but He rose to His divine grandeur 
 as He left them. In the Acts and the Epistles the disciples breathe a far 
 loftier spirituality, in their conception of the work and Person of Christ, 
 than in the Gospels; and Mary, beyond question, was not behind men with 
 whose lot she from that time cast in her own. 
 
 Her meeting with Elisabeth was naturally marked by the deep emotion 
 of both, and we owe to it the earliest and grandest of our hymns, the 
 Magnificat. Greeted by Elisabeth as the future mother of her Lord, Mary 
 breaks out, with the poetical fervour of Eastern nature, in a strain of 
 exalted feeling. The rhythmical expression into which she falls v/as only
 
 70 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 what might have been expected from one imbued, as all Jewish minds were, 
 with the°3tyle and imagery of the Old Testament. Like Miriam, Deborah, 
 Hannah, or Judith, she uttere a song of joy :— 
 
 My soul doth magnify the Lord, 
 
 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour ; 
 
 For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden ; 
 
 For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. 
 
 For He that is mighty hath done to me great things : 
 And Holy is His name. 
 
 And His mercy is on them that fear Him, from generation to generation. 
 
 He hath showed strength with His arm ; 
 
 He hath scattered the proud in tlie imagination of their hearts. 
 
 He hath put down the mighty from their scats ; 
 
 And exalted them of low degree."^ 
 
 He hath filled the hungry with good things ; 
 
 And the rich Ho hath sent empty away. 
 
 He hatli holpen His servant Israel 
 
 In remembrance of His mercy ; 
 
 As He spake to our fathers, 
 
 To Abraham and to his seed, for ever. 
 
 The whole hymn is a mosaic of Old Testament imagery and language, 
 and shows a mind so coloured by the sacred writings of her people that 
 her whole utterance becomes, spontaneously, as by a second nature, an 
 echo of that of prophets and saints. It is such as we might have ex- 
 pected from the lips of some ideal Puritan maiden, in those days in our 
 own history, when men were so deeply read in the oracles of God, that 
 their ordinary conversation fell into Scriptural phrases and allusions, and 
 their whole life was coloured by the daily contemplation of superior beings 
 and eternal interests. Mary, lilce them, must have lived in a constant 
 realization of the presence and special providence of One with whose 
 gTacious communications to her people she had thus filled lier whole 
 thoughts. A Jewish puritanism, of the loftiest and most spiritual type, 
 must have been the very atmosphei'e in which she moved, and in which 
 her child was hereafter to be trained. 
 
 The high intellectual emotion and eloquence of the Magnificat reveal 
 a nature of no common mould, as its intense religions fervour shows 
 spiritual characteristics of the noblest type. But the strain throughout 
 is strictly limited to what we might have expected in a Jewish maiden. 
 It is intensely national when it is not personal. She rejoices in God, and 
 magnifies His name, for having honoured her so greatly, notwithstanding 
 her low estate. He has done great things for her, which will make all 
 generations pronounce her blessed. He has thus favoured her because 
 she feared Him, for His mercy is on such, from generation to generation. 
 As of old, when He showed strength with His arm, and scattered the 
 proud, and put down the mighty from their thrones, to deliver or exalt 
 His weak and lowly people, so, now. He has exalted her, and disappointed 
 the hopes of the great ones; He has filled her, who was like the hungry, 
 with good things, and has sent away empty the rich, who expected His
 
 THE ANNOUNCEMENT TO MARY. 71 
 
 favours. Througli her He has holpen Israel, in remembrance of His 
 promise to her fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed, for ever, that He 
 would be their God. Her son was to be the Anointed who should redeem 
 Israel out of all its troubles. As a descendant of David, she doubtless 
 thinks of Herod, sitting, as an Edomite intruder, on the throne rightfully 
 due to her own race, yet, as an Israelite in the best sense, the redemption 
 of her people goes beyond the merely patriotic and political, to the resto- 
 ration of that primitive loyalty to the God of their fathers which she 
 cherished in her own breast, but the sjiirit of which her people had well- 
 nigh lost, amidst all their steadfastness in the outer forms. 
 
 It is easy to understand how willingly Mary lingered in Hebron, and 
 that she was loth to return to Nazareth sooner than was necessary. 
 Elisabeth knew her great secret and her innocence, but at ISTazareth she 
 would be among her neighbours, who might not credit her assurances ; 
 and she must some day, as late as possible, break the matter to her 
 betrothed. It is no wonder to find that three months passed, before she 
 could venture to tiirn her face homewa,rd once more. 
 
 Her position on her return, indeed, exjDosed her to a trial, great above 
 all others to a virtuous woman. Conscious of perfect purity, she is 
 suspected of the reverse by him to whom her troth is plighted ; but He 
 who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb relieved her from her troubles 
 by making knov^^n to Joseph the mysterious truth. As a just man — which 
 was a current expression of the time for a strict observer of the Law— 
 and yet unwilling to expose her to public shame, he had made np his 
 mind to divorce her formally, by a written " bill," duly attested by 
 witnesses ; but being divinely instructed, that his fears were groundless, 
 he freed her from all future trouble by taking her home as his wife. 
 
 Legend, as might have been expected, was early busy with the story of 
 Mary and Joseph. 
 
 We are told that Joseph, thongh a carpenter, was made a priest in the 
 Temple, because of his knowledge of the Law, and his fame for holiness. 
 Mary was his second wife, and found herself, on her coming home, in a 
 circle of four sons and two daughters, left by her predecessor — the family 
 known in the Gospels as the brethren and sisters of our Lord. Mary, as 
 has been said, was the daughter of Joachim and Anna. On her father's 
 side she came from N'azarGth ; on her mother's, from Bethlehem. Joachim 
 was a simple. God-fearing man, a shepherd, of the tribe of Judah, and 
 married Anna when ho was twenty years of age. Twenty years passed, 
 however, withoiit their having a child, and both Joachim and Anna grieved 
 sorely at their loneliness. At the Temple, Joachim found himself ordered 
 away from among those who had children, and his offerings refused, and 
 Anna, also, had to bear reproach from the women of her people. 
 
 Then " Anna Avept sore, and prayed to God. And when the great day 
 of the Lord came, Judith, her maid, said to her. How long will thy soul 
 mourn ? It becomes thee not to be sad, for the great day of the Lord has 
 come. Take thy head-dress, which the needlewoman gave me ; it is not 
 allovv^cd me to put it on thee, because I am thy maid, and thou comcst of 
 kings,'' Then was Anna much troubled, and laid aside her mourning,
 
 72 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 and adorned her head, and put on her Ijridal robes, and went into the 
 garden about the ninth hour. There she saw a laurel-tree, and sat down 
 beneath it, and prayed thus to God : — " God o£ my fatliers, bless me and 
 hear my cry, as Thou hcardcst Sarah, and blessedst her by giving her a 
 son, Isaac." While, now, she was looking up to heaven, she saw the nest 
 of a sparrow in the laurel-tree, and she sighed and said, " Woe is me, woe 
 is me, who have no child ! Why was I born that I should have become 
 accursed before the children of Israel, and despised, and scorned, and 
 driven away from the temple of the Lord my God .'' Woe is mo, to what 
 can I liken myself? Not to the birds of the heavens, for they have 
 young ; not to the senseless beasts, for they are fruitful before Thee, 
 Lord ; not to the creatures of the waters, for they have young ; not to the 
 earth, for it brings forth fruits in their seasons, and Ijlesses Thee, 
 Lord." 
 
 Then an angel came and told her she should have a child. And Anna 
 said, " As the Lord God liveth, be it male or female that I bear, I vow it 
 to the Lord, and it shall serve Him all the days of its life." And Anna 
 bore a daughter, and called it Mary, as the angel had commanded. 
 
 When six months had passed, Anna put Mary on the ground, and found 
 that she could totter a few steps. Then she said, " As the Lord liveth, 
 thou shalt never put thy foot on the earth again till I have led thee into 
 the Temple of the Lord." At the end of the first year, Joachim made a 
 great feast, and called to it the priests and scribes, and the elders, and 
 many friends. And he brought the maiden to the priests, and they 
 blessed her, and said, " God of our fathers, bless this child, and give her a 
 name Avhicli shall be known through all generations. And all the people 
 said. Amen." 
 
 We are then told that Mary was taken to the Temple when she was 
 three years old, having lived till then in a sanctuary made for her in her 
 father's house. And while Joachim and Anna were at the foot of the 
 fifteen steps that led up to the Temple courts, and were changing their 
 soiled travelling raiment for clean and fitting dress, as the custom was, 
 Mary climbed the steps alone, and never looked back, but kept her face 
 towards the altar. And she was left in the Temple, that she might grow 
 up with the other virgins. 
 
 From this time till she was twelve years old, it is said, she lived in the 
 Temple, her graces keeping pace with her j-ears. From the morning till 
 the third hour, she remained in prayer, and from that till the ninth she 
 was busied with spinning. Then she betook herself once more to prayer, 
 till an angel each day came with food for her. Her betrothal to Joseph is 
 related in great detail, but we forbear to quote it. 
 
 Tradition, to which we owe these beautiful legends, has delighted to 
 speak of the Virgin's appearance and character. She was more given to 
 prayer, we read, than any round her, brighter in the knowledge of God's 
 law, and perfectly humble; she delighted to sing the Psalms of David 
 with a melodious voice, and all loved her for her kindness and modesty. 
 
 It is impossible to trust to the descriptions of Mary's person, but it is 
 interesting to know how remote generations imagined her. She was in all
 
 THE BIRTH OF CIIIIIST. 73 
 
 cliings serious and earnest, says one old tradition, spoke little, and only 
 what was to the purpose ; she was very gentle, and showed respect and 
 honour to all. She was of middle height, though some say she was rather 
 above it. She spoke to all with a prudent frankness, soberly, without con- 
 fusion, and always pleasantly. She had a fair complexion, blonde hair, and 
 bright hazel eyes. Her eyebrows were arched and dark, her nose well pro- 
 portioned, her lips ruddy and full of kindness when she spoke. Her face 
 was long rather than round, and her hands and fingers were finely shaped- 
 She had no pride, but was simple, and wholly free from deceit. Without 
 effeminacy, she was far from forwardness. In her clothes, which she her- 
 self made, she was content with the natural colours. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE BIKTII OP CHRIST. 
 
 "TT might have been expected that Mary's child would have been born in 
 -*- the city of Nazareth, where Joseph and Mary lived, but circum- 
 stances over which they had no control made a distant village the 
 birthplace. 
 
 The Jewish nation had paid tribute to Rome, through their rulers, since 
 the days of Pompey; and the methodical Augustus, who now reigned, 
 and had to restore order and soundness to the finances of the empire, after 
 the confusion and exhaustion of the civil wars, took good care that this 
 obligation should neither be forgotten nor evaded. He was accustomed 
 to require a census to be taken periodically in every province of his vast 
 dominions, that he might know the number of soldiers he could levy in 
 each, and the amount of taxes due to the treasury. So exact was he, that 
 he wrote out with his own hand a summary of statistics of the whole 
 empire, including the citizens and allies in arms, in all the kingdoms and 
 provinces, with their tributes and taxes. Three separate surveys of the 
 empire for such fiscal and military ends are recorded as ordered — in the 
 726th, 7-16th, and 767th years of the city of Rome, respectively : the first, 
 long before the birth of Christ ; the third, in our Lord's youth ; but the 
 second, very near the time when He must have been born. 
 
 In an empire embracing the then known world, such a census could 
 hardly have been made simultaneously, or in any short or fixed time ; more 
 probaljly it was the work of years, in successive provinces or kingdoms. 
 Sooner or later, however, even the dominions of vassal kings like Hei'od 
 had to furnish the statistics demanded by their master. He had received 
 his kingdom on the footing of a subject, and grew more entirely dependent 
 on Augustus as years passed, asking his sanction at every turn for steps 
 he proposed to take. He would, thus, be only too ready to meet his wish, 
 by obtaining the statistics he sought, as may be judged from the fact that 
 in one of the last years of his life, just before Christ's birth, he made the 
 whole Jewish nation take a solemn oath of allegiance to the Empei'or as 
 well as to himself.
 
 74 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 It is quite proljable that the mode of taking the required statistics was 
 left very much to Herod, at once to show respect to him before his people, 
 and from the known opposition of the Jews to anything like a general 
 numeration, even apart from the taxation to which it was designed to 
 lead. At the time to which the narrative refers, a simple registration 
 seems to have been made, on the old Hebrew plan of enrolling by families, 
 in their ancestral districts, of course for future use ; and thus it passed 
 over quietly. The very different results, when it was followed by a general 
 taxation, some years later, will hereafter be seen. 
 
 The proclamation having been made throiigh the land, Joseph had no 
 choice but to go to Bethlehem, the city of David, the place in.which his family 
 descent, from the house and lineage of David, required him to be inscribed, 
 It must, apparently, have been near the close of the year 749 of Eome, or 
 at the opening of 750 ; but winter in Palestine is not necessarily severe, 
 for the flowers spring xip after the November rains, and flocks are often 
 driven out to the pastures, as St. Luke tells us was the case at the time 
 of Christ's birth. Unwilling to leave her behind in a home so new to her, 
 Joseph took Mary with him : the two journeying most likely, as tradition 
 has painted— Joseph afoot, with Mary on an ass at his side. There were 
 by-paths interlacing and crossing, all over the country, and they may have 
 chosen some of these ; but if they kept to the travelled road, which it is 
 most likely they did, both for safety and company, we can follow their pro- 
 gress even now. 
 
 Passing down the little valley of ISTazareth, they would find themselves 
 crossing the rich plain of Esdraelon — not then, as noAV, half tilled and well, 
 nigh unpeopled, but covered with cities and villages, full of teeming life 
 and human activities. Galilee, according to Josephus, contained in those 
 daj^s two hundred and four cities and villages, the smallest of which 
 niinibcred above fifteen thousand inhabitants. It is calculated, indeed, 
 that it had a population of about fifteen hundred to the square mile, which 
 is a third more than the number in Lancashire, crowded as it is with large 
 and densely peopled towns. Speaking of the district just north of Galilee, 
 Captain Burton tells us that, to one standing on a peak of Lebanon, 
 overlooking it, " the land must, in many places, have appeared to be one 
 continuous town ; " and in the highlands of Syria, still north of this, in 
 the region of Hamah, there are the ruins of three hundred and sixty-five 
 towns, so that Mr. Drake had good ground for thinking the Aral)s right in 
 saying, "that a man might formerly have travelled for a year in this dis- 
 trict, and never have slept twice in the same village." 
 
 Leaving, on the left, the rounded height of Tabor, and the villages of 
 Nain and Endor, underneath the hills, the road stretched directly south to 
 Jezreel, once Ahab's capital, on a gentle swell of the rich plain of Esdraelon. 
 On their way they would pass through a landscape of busy cities and 
 towns, varied by orchards, vineyards, gardens, and fields, for every avail- 
 able spot was cultivated, to the very tops of the hills. The mountains of 
 Gilboa, where Saul perished, lay a little east of Jezreel as they went on, 
 and then came Engannim, with its spring, on the edge of the hill- 
 country of Samaria. Dothanj with its rich pastures, where Joseph had
 
 THE EIRTil or CHRIST. 75 
 
 found his brethren so many ages before, would soon be seen on their right ; 
 and, Ijefore long, their winding road, rising and falling among continuous 
 hills, would bring them to Samaria itself, then just rebuilt by Herod, with 
 such magnificence, that he had given it the name of Scbaste, the Greek 
 equivalent of Augusta, in honour of his imperial master. Sychar or 
 Shcchem, with its lovely neighbourhood, would be their resting-place on 
 the second day, for it is noarl^^ midway between Judea and Galilee ; and 
 though the distance between the two was often reckoned as onlya three days' 
 journey, it was not uncommon to lengthen it to four. As the chief town 
 of the Samaritans, Sychar would hardly offer hospitality to travellers with 
 their faces towards the hated Jerusalem. Joseph and Mary, as was the 
 custom with Jews i:)assing through, would, therefore, avoid the town, 
 and pass the night in what shelter they could find at Jacob's springs, — or 
 Jacob's well, as our version has it, — not far off, eating provisions they had 
 brought with them, to avoid ta,sting food defiled by the touch of a Samar- 
 itan, and drinking only the water from the springs. The beauty of 
 the valley, with its swelling heights of Ebal and Gerizim, separated only 
 by a few hundred paces, and its rich upland glens, opening on each side 
 beyond — the crown and water-shed of Central Palestine — would have 
 little interest to them, for it was Samaritan ground. They would breathe 
 freely only when they had passed the heights of Akrabbim, the border 
 ridge between Samaria and Judea, and had set foot again on the holy soil 
 of Israel. 
 
 Once in Judea, its bleak and bare hills were hallowed, at each opening 
 of the landscape, by the sight of spots sacred to every Jew. Shiloh would 
 greet them first, where Hannah came to pray before the Lord ; then 
 Gilgal, where her son sat to judge Israel. Their way would next pass 
 through the valley of Baca, of which the Psalmist had sung, " Passing 
 through the valley of tears, they made it rich in springs ; and the latter 
 rain covers it with blessings." The road winds on from this, through 
 the district tovrn Gophua, past the venerable Bethel, with all its 
 memories, and past Eamah, in Benjamin, where Jeremiah had pictured 
 Eachel weeping for her children, slain or carried off by the Babylonian 
 conqueror. Over against it rose Gibeon, high on its hill, where Solomon 
 worshipped; and an hour later they would pass Mizpeh, on its lonely 
 height, where Samuel raised his memorial stone Ebonezer. And then, at 
 last, after having passed from one holy place to another, their feet would 
 stand within the gates of Jerusalem. 
 
 Bethlehem, the end of their journey, lay about sis miles south of Jeru- 
 salem, on the east of the main road to Hebron. It covered the upper slope, 
 and part of the top, of a narrow ridge of grey Jura limestone, aljout a mile 
 in length— one of the countless heights, seamed by narrow valleys, whicli 
 make up the hill country of Judea. Its narrow, steep streets lay no less 
 than 2,538 Paris feet above the Mediterranean, and looked out over a sea of 
 hills, bare and rocky,— one of them, about three- miles to the east, the peak 
 of the Frank mountain, Jebel Fureidis, now bare, but then covered with 
 the new fortifications of Herodium, in the circuit of which the hated tyrant 
 Herod was soon to find his tomb. On the east, the mountains of Moab
 
 76 THE LIFE OF CHIIIST. 
 
 rose against tlio horizon like a purple wall, tlie barren and desolate up- 
 lands of tlie wilderness of Judea lying between, and stretching far to the 
 south. The ridge of Bethlehem itself is still covered, on its northern side, 
 as all the hills around must have been in Mary's day, wdth bold, sweeping 
 lines of terraces, which descend, like gigantic steps, to the lower 
 valleys, and bear tier on tier of fig-trees, olives, pomegranates, and 
 vines ; the vines overhanging the terrace banks, and relieving the eye 
 from the dazzling glare of the white limestone rocks and soil. The ridge, 
 as a whole, breaks down, abruptly, into deep valleys— on the north, south, 
 and cast, passing into gorges, which descend, in the distance, to the Dead 
 Sea on the east, and to the coast lowlands on the west. In a little plain 
 close under the town, to the eastward, are some vineyards and barlcy-ficlds, 
 in which Euth came to glean in the early days of Israel, beside a gentle 
 brook which still murmurs through them. 
 
 It was to Bethlehem that Joseph and Mary were coming, the town of 
 Euth and Boaz, and the early home of their own great forefather David. 
 As they approached it from Jerusalem, they would pass, at the last mile, 
 a spot sacred to Jewish memory, where the light of Jacob's life went out, 
 when his first love, Eachel, died, and was buried, as her tomb still shows, 
 " in the way to Ephrath, v/hich is Bethlehem." 
 
 The ascent to the town, over the dusty glare of the grey limestone hills, 
 was the last of the journey, and it is well if Mary did not find it, in parts, as 
 other travellers have found it, before and since, so slippery as to make it 
 seem safer to alight and go up on foot. A quarter of a mile to the nortli 
 of the town-gate she would pass the well, from which, as she had heard 
 from infancy, her ancestor David had so longed to drink. Presently, 
 passing through the low gate, she and Joseph were in the mountain town 
 or village of Bethlehem. 
 
 Travelling in the East has always been very different from Western 
 ideas. As in all thinly-settled countries, private hospitality, in early times, 
 .supplied the want of inns ; but it was the peculiarity of the East that tliis 
 friendly custom continued through a long series of ages. On the great 
 roads through barren or uninhabited parts, the need of shelter led, very 
 early, to the erection of rude and simple buildings, of varying size, known 
 as khans, which offered the wayfarer the protection of walls and a roof, 
 and water, bat little more. The smaller structures consisted of some- 
 times only a single empty room, on the floor of which the traveller might 
 spread his carpet for sleep ; the larger ones, always built in a hollow square, 
 enclosing a court for the beasts, with water in it for them and their 
 masters. From immemorial antiquity it has been a favourite mode of 
 benevolence to raise such places of shelter, as we see so far back as the 
 times of David, when Chimhani built a great khan near Bethlehem, on 
 the caravan road to Egypt. 
 
 But while it has long been thus, in special circumstances, the Eastern 
 sense of the sacredness of hospitality, Avhich was felt deeply by the Jews, 
 made inns, in our sense, or even khans, where travellers provided for them- 
 selves, unnecessary in any peopled place. The simplicity of Eastern life, 
 which has fewer wants than the Western mind can well realize, aided by
 
 THE BIRTH OF CHRIST. 77 
 
 universal hospitality, opened private houses everywhere to the traveller, 
 The ancient Jew, like the modern Arab, held it a reflection on a community 
 if a passing wayfarer was not made some one's guest. To bring water at 
 once, to wash the traveller's feet, dusty with the Eastern sandals, was an 
 act of courtesy which it showed a churlish spirit to omit. Food and lodg- 
 ing, for himself and his beasts, if he had any, were provided, and he was 
 regarded as under the sacred protection of his host. At the time of 
 Christ this priinitive simplicity still continued. The Eabbis constantly 
 urge the religious merit of hospitality, promising Paradise as its reward, 
 and ranking the kindly reception of strangers higher than to have been 
 honoured by an appearance of the Shechinah itself. Its universal recog- 
 nition as a natural duty, in His age, is often found even in the discourses 
 of our Lord. 
 
 AVc may feel sure, therefore, that it was not an " inn " where Joseph and 
 Mary found shelter after their journey, though that word is used in our 
 English version. In the only two other places in which it occurs, it refers 
 to a friendly "guest-chamber " in a private house. At such a time, how- 
 ever, when strangers had arrived from every part, the household to which 
 they looked for entertainment had already opened their guest-chamber to 
 earlier comers, and the only accommodation that could be offered was a 
 place, half kit jhen and half staljle, which was simply one of the countless 
 natural hollows or caves in the hill-side, against which the house had been 
 built, as is still seen frequently in Palestine. 
 
 How long Joseph and Mary had been in Bethlehem before Jesus was 
 born, it is impossible to say, for time is of no value to Orientals, and a stay 
 of a few weeks more or less would be little regarded. St. Luke merely 
 tells us that while they were there Mary gave birth to the Saviour. Milton, 
 following the immemorial tradition of the Church, sings : 
 
 " It was the winter wild 
 
 While the heaven-born child, 
 All meanly wrapt, in the rude manger lies; 
 
 Nature, in awe to him, 
 
 Had doff'd her gaudy trim, 
 With her groat Master so to sympathize ; 
 
 It was no season then for her 
 
 To wanton with the sun." 
 
 But tlie poet's fancy alone creates the bleak wintryness of the time, for 
 the outlying shepherds on the hills around were living witnesses of the 
 reverse. Yet it seems most probable that the great event took place be- 
 tween December, 749, of Eome, and Feln-uary, 750 ; and the only reason , 
 why there can be any hesitation in supposing December 2oth to have been ' 
 the very day is the natural doubt whether the date could have been handed 
 down so exactly, and the fear lest the wish to associate the birth of the 
 Eedeemer with the return of the sun, which made Christmas be early 
 spoken of as the " day of the triumphant sun," may have led to its having 
 been chosen. 
 
 The simplicity of St. Luke's narrative is very striking. An event, com- 
 pared with which all others in human history are insignificant, is recorded 
 in a few words, without any attempt at exaggeration or embellishment.
 
 78 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 The Apocryphal Gospels, on the contrary, abound in mu-aculous details, 
 for the most part trifling and childish. Some features in their narratives, 
 however, are not wauting in naturalness or even sublimity, and, at the 
 least, they have the merit of showing how the early Clmrch painted for 
 itself the scene of the Nativity. " It happened," says these old legends, 
 "as Mary and Joseph were going up towards Bethlehem, that the time 
 came when Jesus should be born, and Mary said to Joseph, ' Take me down 
 from my ass,' and he took her down from her ass, and said to her, ' Where 
 shall I take thee, for there is no inn here? ' Then he found a cave near 
 the grave of Eachel, the wife of the patriarch Jacob —the mother of J oseph 
 and Benjamin; and light never entered the cave, but it was always filled 
 with darkness. And the sun was then just going down. Into this he led 
 her, and left his two sons beside her, and went out towards Bethlehem to 
 seek help. But when Mary entered the cave it was presently filled with 
 light, and beams, as if of the sun, shone around ; and thus it cojitinued, day 
 and night, while she remained in it. 
 
 " In this cave the child was born, and the angels were round Him at His 
 birth, and worshipped the JSTew-born, and said, ' Glory to God in the highest, 
 and peace on earth and goodwill to men.' Meanwhile Jose2:)h was wander- 
 ing about, seeking help. And when he looked up to heaven, he saw that 
 the pole of the heavens stood still, and the birds of the air stopped in the 
 midst of their flight, and the sky was darkened. And looking on the earth 
 he saw a dish full of food, prepared, and workmen, resting round it, with 
 their hands in the dish to eat, and thosQ who were stretching out their 
 hands did not take any of the food, and those who were lifting their hands 
 to their mouths did not do so, but the faces of all were turned upwards. 
 And he saw sheep Ayliich were being driven along, and the sheep stood 
 still, and the shepherd lifted his hand to strike them, but it remained up- 
 lifted. And he came to a spring, and saw the goats with their mouths 
 touching the water, but they did not drink, but were under a spell, for all 
 things at that moment were turned from their course." 
 
 But if wonders such as these were wanting, the birth of the Saviour was 
 not without attestations of His divine glory. If His birth was mean on 
 earth below, it v/as celebrated with hallelujahs by the heavenly Jiost in the 
 air above. The few fields in the valley below Bethlehem have, likely, been 
 always too valuable to be used for pasture, but the slopes and heights of 
 the hills around were then, as they had been in David's time, and 
 are still, the resort of shepherds, with tlieir numerous flocks, Avhich 
 supplied the requirements of the neighbouring Temple. The " Onomas- 
 tioon" of Eusebius informs us that about "a thousand paces from 
 Bethlehem stands a tower called Eder — that is, the tower of the 
 shepherds — a name which foreshadowed the angelic appearance to 
 the shepherds, at the birth of our Lord." Jewish tradition has pre- 
 served the record of a tower of this name, in this locality, where the flocks 
 of sheep for the Temple sacrifices were pastured ; and there still remain, 
 at the given distance, eastwards from Bethlehem, the ruins of a church 
 which Helena, the mother of Constantine, caused to be built on the spot 
 believed to have been that ab which the heavenly vision was seen.
 
 THE BIRTH OF CHRIST. 79 
 
 On the night of the birth of Christ, a group of shepherds lay out, with 
 their flocks, on the hill-side, in the neighbourhood of this ancient watch- 
 tower. Some of them were keeping their turn of watching while the 
 others slept, for shepherds relieved each other by watches, as our sailors 
 do, at fixed hours. St. Luke expressly tells us that they were " watching 
 the Avatches of the night." To have received such surpassing honour from 
 above, they must have been members, though poor and humble, of that 
 true Israel which included Mary and Joseph, Zacharias and Elisabeth, 
 Simeon and Anna — the reiiresentatives, in those dark days, of the saints 
 of their nation in its brighter past. They must have been men looking 
 out, in their simple way, tow^ards the invisible and eternal, and seeking 
 that kingdom of God for themselves which was one day, as they believed, 
 to be revealed in their nation at large. Only tha.t mind which has sym- 
 pathy with external nature can receive in their true significance the im- 
 pressions it is fitted to convey, and only the heart which has sympathy 
 with spiritual things can recognise their full meaning. Poetic sensibility 
 is required in the one case, and religious in the other. In each it is the 
 condition of sincere emotion. The stillness over hill and valley, broken 
 only by the bleating of the sheep ; the unclouded brightness of the Syrian 
 sky, witii its innumerable stars ; and the associations of these mountain 
 pastures, dear to every Jew, as the scene of David's youth, were over and 
 around them. And now, to quote the beautiful narrative of St. Luke, " lo, 
 an angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone 
 round about them, and they "were sore afraid. And the angel said unto 
 them, ' Fear not, for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which 
 shall be unto all the people. For unto you is born, this day, in the City 
 of David, a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. And this shall be the sign 
 unto you : ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a 
 manger.' And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the 
 Heavenly Host, praising God and saying — 
 
 ' Glory to God in the highest, 
 And on earth peace. 
 Goodwill toward men.' " 
 
 With this ever-memorable anthem — the first and last melody of heaven 
 ever heard by mortal ears — the light faded from the hills, as the angels 
 Vv^ent away into heaven, and left earth once more in the shadow of night, 
 knowing and thinking nothing of that which so supremely interested 
 distant worlds. Wondering at such a vision, and full of simple trust, the 
 shepherds had only one thought— to see the babe and its mother for them- 
 selves. Climbing the hill, therefore, with eager haste, they hurried to 
 Bethlehem, and there found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a 
 manger, as had been told them. 
 
 No details are given: no heightening of the picture of this first act of 
 reverence to the new-born Saviour. I>for are they needed. The lowliness 
 of the visitors, the pure image of the Virgin Mother and her Child, are 
 better loffc in their own simplicity. Infancy is for ever dignified 'oy the 
 manger of Bethlehem: womanhood is ennobled to its purest ideal in Mary:
 
 80 TUB LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 man, as such, i-eccives abiding honour, in the earliest accepted homage to 
 her Sou being that of the simple poor. 
 
 A great teacher has pointed some striking lessons on the way in -which 
 the whole incident Avas received, as St. Luke relates, by those immediately 
 concerned. The shepherds spread abroad the story, with hearts full of 
 grateful adoration ; the hearers wonder at it, but Mary ponders in her 
 heart all that liad been told her. "There were more virgins in Israel, 
 more even of the tribe of David, than she," says the great preacher ; " but 
 she was the Chosen of God. It was natm-al, and it is easy to miderstand, 
 that when a second appearance of angels, like that which she had already 
 herself experienced, was seen, she should ponder in her heart their words, 
 which concerned her so nearly. But, if we ask om'selves — Was this pon- 
 dering the words in her heart [already the true faith that carries the 
 blessing, — the fruitful seed of a personal relation to the Saviour ? — Did 
 Mary already believe, firmly and immovably, that the Saviour of the world 
 should see the light of life through her ? — the Gospels leave us too clearly 
 to think the opposite. There was a time, long after this, when Christ was 
 already a Teacher, when she wavered between Him and His brethren who 
 did not believe in Him ; when she went out with them to draw Him away 
 from His course, and bring Him back to her narrower circle of home life, 
 as one who was hardly in His right mind. Firm, unwavering trust, that 
 knows no passing cloud, is a work of time with all Avho have an inner 
 personal nearness to the Saviour ; and it was so with Mar3^ She reached 
 it only, like us all, through manifold doubts and struggles of heart, by 
 that grace from above which roused her, ever, anew, and led her on from 
 step to step." 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 AX BETHLEHEM. 
 
 r I 1HB first two months of the life of Christ, if not a longer time, were 
 -■- spent quietly in Bethlehem. That great event in a Hebrew house- 
 hold. His circumcision, marked the eighth day from His birth. To dedi- 
 cate their children to the God of Israel in His appointed way, and thu,s at 
 once give them " a portion in Israel," and set them apart from the nations 
 by this sacred token, was a duty which no Jewish parent would for a 
 moment dare to neglect. "On the eighth day," says the Book of Jubilees, 
 '• shalt thou circumcise thy boy, for on that day were Abraham and the 
 people of his house circumcised. And no one may dare to change the day, 
 nor go a day beyond the eight days, for it is an everlasting law, established 
 and graven on the tablets of heaven. And he who does it not belongs not 
 to the children of the promise, but to the children of destruction. Sons of 
 Belial are they who do it not." The infant Saviour was in all probability 
 carried on the legal day to the Temple, as it Avas so near, for the perform- 
 ance of the rite, — for Joseph and Mary, like all other Jews, would think 
 a religious act doubly sacred within the halloAved courts of Mount Zion.
 
 AT BETHLEHEM. 81 
 
 Custom, however, would allow its being done in the local synagogue, or in 
 the humble house o£ prayer in Bethlehem itself, or even in the house in 
 which Mary and Joseph lodged. 
 
 The name Mary's child received had already been fixed at the Annun- 
 ciation, and was formally given at the circumcision, in accordance with 
 Jewish customs in reference to male infants. Its association with such a 
 strictly Jewish rite made it the symbol of the child's formal admission 
 into the congregation of Israel, of which he was henceforth a member. 
 The infant Jesus was now an acknowledged Israelite. 
 
 Thirty-three days more had to elapse, in accordance with Jewish custom, 
 before Mary could visit the Temple, or even go outside her dwelling, or 
 touch anything made sacred by being consecrated to God. Including the 
 circumcision week, the Jewish mother had to pass forty days of seclusion 
 after the birth of a son, and sixty-six after that of a daughter, before 
 she could again take part in common life. After this long delay, she 
 might appear in the Holy Place, to thank God for her preservation, and 
 to receive from the priest the legal rite of purification. 
 
 When, at last, the day of her long-desired visit to the Temple came, 
 Marj^ with her child, had to present themselves in the Court of the 
 Women as soon as the morning incense had been offered, and the nine 
 blasts of the Temple trumpets had given the signal for morning prayer. 
 The road from Bethlehem ran alono; the western side of the hill which 
 overlooks Mount Zion from the south — that on which Pompey, sixty years 
 before, had pitched his camp^a defilement of the holy soil never since 
 forgotten. Passing Herod's great amphitheatre, with its heathen orna- 
 ments — a sight as revolting to a Jewess as was the remembrance of the 
 bloody games celebrated in the circus within — Mary would go up the 
 Valley of the Giants, and at the further end of it the full sj^lendour of the 
 city and Temple would be before her. The long sweep of the valley of 
 Hinnom ran, bending eastward, to the valley of the Kidron, with the roj-al 
 gardens where the two valleys met, and mansions and palaces rising on 
 the hills beyond. Over Ophel rose the dazzling whiteness of the Eoyal 
 Porch of the Temple, a structure longer and higher than York Cathedral, 
 built upon a solid mass of masonry, almost ecjual in height to the tallest of 
 our church spires. Passing up the noi'thern arm of Hinnom, her road 
 skirted the pools of Gihon, shining, as she looked at them, in the morning 
 light, and wound round to the Gennath Gate, under the shadow of the 
 great towers beyond the palace of Herod, on the line of the oldest of the 
 city walls. These fortresses had all been built by Ilerod to overawe 
 Jerusalem, and had been named by him ; the one, after his friend Hippicus, 
 the next, after his brother Phasael, and the third, after his wife Mariamne, 
 whom he had murdered, but could not forget. On the north-east, the 
 colossal, eight-sided Psephinos, with its double crown of breastworks and 
 battlements, looked down on the city, and all four glittered in the early 
 light, and rose high into the clear blue of the sky. Mary was now within 
 the walls of Jerusalem, and had to thread her way through the narroAV 
 streets of the lower town, till, after crossing the bridge over the valley, to 
 TMount Moviah, she at last reached the eastern side of the Temple, where 
 
 G
 
 82 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 the Golden Gate, at the head of the long flight of steps that led to the 
 valley of the Kidron, opened into the Court of the Women. 
 
 She would, doubtless, be early enough on her way to hoar the three 
 trumpet blasts -which announced the opening of the outer gate, long before 
 the call to prayer. The earlier she came, the less chance would there 
 be of meeting anything on the way that might defile her, and prevent her 
 entering the Tem2:)le. Women on her errand commonly rode to the Temple 
 on oxen, that the body of so huge a beast between them and the ground 
 might i^revent any chance of defilement from passing over a sepulchre on 
 the road, and, doubtless, she rode either an ass or an ox, as was the custom. 
 
 While the mothers who wei'e coming that morning for purification 
 gradually gathered, Mary would have to wait outside the lofty gate of the 
 Court of the Israelites, known as that of Nicanor, because the head and 
 hands of the Syrian general of that name, slain in battle Ijy Judas Mac- 
 cabeus, had lieen hung up on it in triumph. She had doubtless often 
 heard, among the household stories of her childhood, how the haughty 
 enemy of her people wagged his hand, each day, towards Judea and 
 Jerusalem, with the words " Oh ! when will it be in my power to lay 
 them waste ? " and how the hand that had thus been lifted against the 
 holy place in blasphemy had been exposed on the gate before her in 
 shame. It was the greatest of all the Temple gates : greater even than 
 the outer gate east of it, known as the Beautiful, from its being covered 
 with massy silver and gold, richly carved, or from its being made of 
 Corinthian brass, elaborately chased, and of far higher value than even 
 gold. It was known also as the Agrippa Gate, for over its eastern, or 
 outer side, glittered a gigantic Eoman eagle, underneath which Herod had 
 inscribed the name of his friend Vipsanius Agrippa, the friend and son-in- 
 law of Augustus, A flight of fifteen steps, in crescent shape, formed the 
 approach to it, and marked the height of the Court of the Men, above that 
 of the Women. The gate, itself, stood at the inner end of a massive 
 structure, fifty cubics in depth, with porticoes at the eastern side, and 
 chambers above it, under which Joseph doubtless waited with Mary, for 
 husbands could enter the Court of the Women with their wives, thouo-h 
 no woman could pass into the Court of the Men. They must have 
 shuddered as they passed underneath the great golden eagle, the hateful 
 symbol of idolatry and Eoman domination, for destroying which, in the 
 riots before Herod's death, so many of the flower of Jerusalem were soon 
 to die. 
 
 After a time, the Nicanor Gate was opened, aiid the offerings of all the 
 women who had come for purification, which was much the same as 
 churching is with us, were taken from them by the Levites, into the Court 
 of the Priests, to be burned on the altar, after the morning sacrifice. 
 Mary might have had either a lamb or a pair of young pigeons, for the 
 rite ; but Joseph was pooi-, and she Avas contented with the cheaper 
 offering of doves, probably bought from the Temple officer who kept 
 flocks of doves, purchased with the funds of the Temple, aiid sold them to 
 those who were about to offer, at the market price. Or she may have got 
 them in the outer court, Avhic^h had been turned into a noisy bazaai*, by
 
 AT BETHLEHEM. 83 
 
 great numbers of money-changers, sellers of doves, and even dealers in 
 oxen, wlio sought the custom of the crowds frequenting the Temple, 
 contrary to the very idea of such a place. Meanwhile, the assembled 
 mothers spent the interval before their offering was laid on the altar in 
 giving thanks to God for their recoveiy. After a time, a priest came with 
 some of the blood, and, having sprinkled them with it, pronounced them 
 clean, and thus the rite ended. 
 
 Her own "purification," however, was not the only object of this first 
 visit to the Temple, after the birth of her Son. In the patriarchal times, 
 the firstborn son of each family seems to have been the assistant of the 
 Family Head in the priestly services of the household. Jewish tradition 
 has always supported this belief, and the ancient commentators appeal to 
 various passages in support of it. A great change was, however, intro- 
 duced by Moses. Aaron and his sons were set apart, with the wtole tribe 
 of Levi, as the only pi-iests, and thus the priestly services of the firstljorn 
 were no longer required. That they had originally been claimed, however, 
 was still kept before the people by a law ei'elong announced at Sinai, that 
 the eldest male, of both man and beast, was sacred to God. Of the lower 
 creatures, some were to be offered on the altar ; others redeemed at a 
 fixed price. The firstborn son was to be presented before God in the 
 Temple, and consecrated to His service, a month after birth, but a money 
 payment of not more than five shekels, aud, in the case of a parent's 
 poverty, of less, was accepted as a " redemption " of the rights this in- 
 volved. Rabbinical law, in the time of Mary, had made a refinement on 
 the original statute of Moses, no child being required to be " presented to 
 the Lord " who was in any way maimed, or defective, or had any blemish, 
 so as to be unfit for a priest — a rule which throws an incidental light on 
 Mai'y's child, such as might have been expected. He must have been, in 
 all points, without physical blemish. 
 
 The details of the ceremony, as observed in tlie days of our Lord, have 
 not come down to us, but may, doubtless, be illustrated by those still in 
 force ; for the " redemption of the firstborn " is still observed by strict 
 Jews as the legacy of immemorial tradition. The Hebrew father invites 
 ten friends and a Rabbi, who must be a Cohen — that is, one reputed to 
 belong to the House of Aaron — to his house, on the thirty-first day after 
 the child's birth. The infant is presently brought in by the father and 
 laid before the Rabbi, with a sum of money — which, in England, if the 
 father be ordinarily well-to-do, generally amounts to about twelve 
 shillings. He then formally tells the Rabbi that his wife, who is an 
 Israelite, has borne, as her firstborn, a male child, which, therefore, he now 
 gives to the Raljbi, as the representative of God. " Which would you, 
 then, rather do ? " asks the Rabin, " give up your firstborn, who is the first 
 child of his mother, to Jehovah, or redeem him for five shekels, after tha 
 shekel of the sanctuary, which is five gera P " The father, of course, 
 answers that he wishes to redeem his child. " This is my firstborn," says 
 he ; " hero, take unto thee the five shekels due for his redemption." As ho 
 hands the money to the Rabbi, lie praises God for the day—" Blessed art 
 Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast sanctified us with
 
 84 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Thy commandments, and commanded lis to perform the redemption of a 
 son. Blessed art Thon, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast 
 maintained ns, and jireserved us, to enjoy this season." The Eabbi then 
 takes the money, and after passing the coin round the child's head, as a 
 symbol of redemption, lays his other hand on its brow, with the words— 
 " This [child] is instead of this [money], and this [money] instead of this 
 [child] : may this child be brought to life, to the Law, and to the fear of 
 heaven ; and as he has been brought to be ransomed, so may he enter into 
 the Law, and good deeds." He then places both his hands on the child's 
 head, and prays — " God make thee as Ephraim and Manasseh. The Lord 
 bless and preserve thee. The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and 
 give thee peace. Length of days, years, and peace be gathered to thee; and 
 God keep thee from all evil and save tliy soul." And now the rite is over. 
 In a nation which has boasted, for two thousand years, that it hands 
 down its religious customs, from generation to generation, without a 
 shadow of change, in word or form, a practice of to-day is, doubtless, in 
 most respects, identical with its counterpart in the time of Maiy. It was, 
 we may assume, with some such prayers and solemn forms that Joseph and 
 Mary, still standing before the ISTicanor Gate, "presented" the infant 
 Saviour "to the Lord," after Maiy had been declared "clean" by the 
 spriniding of the blood of the doves. 
 
 It was still morning, and crowds of men were entering the Court of the 
 Israelites, by the Nicanor Gate, or jDassing out. The mothers and fathers 
 who had firstborn sons to redeem were still before the gate, Maiy and 
 Joseph among them. And now an aged man, who could not come earlier 
 to his morning devotions, approaches. We know only that his name was 
 Simeon, a very common one, then, among the Jews, and that he was one in 
 whom the reign of form and rite had not extinguished true spiritual con- 
 ceptions. He was " a just man and devout," says St. Luke— an expres- 
 sion, the force of which, in those days, is seen in the explanation of nearly 
 the same character given to the great high priest Simon. " He was called 
 ' Just ' both for his piety towards God, and his charity towards his 
 countrymen." Simeon must have been one who, though he followed the 
 Law, did so from the love of it, and from the fear of God, and was careful 
 of its spirit, while, no doubt, exact in the countless ritual observaiices then 
 thought to constitute " righteousness " ; one, like Nathanael, " an Israelite 
 indeed, in whom was no guile." Habitually drawing near God, the 
 promise had been fulfilled to this aged saint that God would draw near to 
 him : for " the Holy Ghost was upon him." Too old to care for longer 
 life, so far as earth alone was concerned, his heart yet beat warmly for his 
 down-trodden nation, and for man at large, sunk in heathen darkness. He 
 would fain wait among the living till the appearance of the " Consolation 
 of Israel " — the familiar name by which his race, in their deep yearning 
 for deliverance, had come to speak of the long expected Messiah, as the 
 sure restorer of its glory. He had a premonition, divinely sent, that he 
 should have this joy, and had come this morning " by the spirit " into the 
 Temple. How he knew it we cannot tell, but, as Mary stood presenting 
 her child, he recognised in Him the " Messiah of God." The ceremony
 
 AT BETHLEHEM. 85 
 
 over, his full heart cannot restrain itself. Tottering towards the young 
 raother, he takes her babe in his arms, and give thanks to God in words of 
 touching beauty — •" Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace, 
 according to Thy word : for mine eyes have seen Thy Salvation, which 
 Thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples : a light to lighten the 
 heathen and the glory of Thy people ISrael." Like a true Jew, he thinks 
 of Israel as the centre of the Messianic glory, the light of which is to 
 stream, afar, over the heathen world around, attracting them to it. 
 
 Turning to Joseph and Mary, the old man then says a few parting 
 words, with prophetic insight of the future both of the child and its 
 mother. " Your child," says he to her, "is destined for the fall of many 
 in Israel, for many will reject Him ; but also for the rising again of many, 
 who will believe on Him and live. He is sent for a sign which shall be 
 spoken against, and will meet with reproach and contradiction, which will 
 reveal the thoughts of many hearts respecting Him " — a truth too sadly 
 culminating at Calvary. Mary's own heart " would be piei'ced with a 
 great sorrow." 
 
 At that instant, we are told, an aged woman, Amia by name, of the 
 tribe of Asher, and therefore a Galilean, approached the gate. She was 
 eighty-four years old, and had thus lived through the long sad period of 
 war, conquest, and oppression, which had intensified, in every Jewish 
 heart, the yearning for national deliverance by the promised Messiah. She 
 must have remembered the fatal war between the Asmonean brothers, 
 Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, which had brought all the misery of her 
 people in its train, and she had likely seen the legions of Pompcy, when 
 they encamped on the hills round Jerusalem. The rise of Herod was 
 a recollection of her middle life, and its dreadful story of war, murder, and 
 crime, must have sunk into her heart, as it had into the hearts of all her 
 race. 
 
 Her long life had been spent in pious acts and services, for, after she 
 had been seven years a wife, her husband had died, leaving her, doubtless, 
 still very young, since Hebrew girls married at twelve or fourteen years of 
 age. She had never married again, a fact mentioned by St. Luke in 
 accordance with the feeling of the day, to her honour, but had been, in 
 the words of St. Paul, " a widow indeed," " trusting in God," and " con- 
 tinuing in supplications and prayers night and day." She might, in 
 truth, be said to have lived in the Temple, and to have spent her life in 
 fastings and prayers ; having very likely come from Galilee to be near the 
 holy place, and thus able to give herself up to religious exercises, on the 
 spot, where, in the eyes of a Jew, they were most sacred. 
 
 Such a woman must have been well known in a place like Jerusalem. 
 Catching the burden of Simeon's words as she passed, she too, like him, 
 forthwith thanks God that the promise of the Messiah is now, at last, 
 fulfilled. There could have been few, however, to whom the glad tidings 
 of such a Saviour were welcome, for tliough the heart of the nation was 
 burning with Messianic hopes of a political kind, we arc told that Anna 
 was able to announce the birth of Christ to all in Jerusalem who looked 
 for a redemption of a higher type.
 
 86 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Eeturning to Bcthleliom, Joseph and Mary seem to have intended to 
 settle in it permanently, for even after their retnrn from Egypt they 
 would have gone to it again, but for their fear of Archelaus. St. Matthew 
 speaks of their living in a " house " when the Magi came, very soon after 
 the Presentation, but the natural chamber in the hill-side, which was 
 Mary's first shelter, would be as much a part of a house as any other. It 
 has for ages been the custom to speak of the birthplace of Jesus as a cave, 
 though the word raises very different ideas in our minds from any that 
 could have been felt where such cool, dry recesses are, even still, ordinary 
 parts of village or country houses of the humbler kind. 
 
 The " Cave of the Nativity " now shown in Bethlehem, is surrounded by 
 such artificial distractions, that it is hard to realize the possibility of its 
 being the actual scene of the most stupendous event in all history. A 
 convent, like a mediceval castle for strength and solidity, and of great 
 extent, crowns the hill, its huge buttresses resting on the shelving rocks 
 far below. The village lies on the eastern and western summit-crests of 
 the hill, at a height above the sea only 300 feet lower than the top of 
 Helvellyn, and as high as the loftiest hill-top in the Cheviot range. You 
 may easily walk round it, or from side to side of it, in a quarter of an hour, 
 or along its whole length in half that time. The villagers support them- 
 selves partly by field work, but mainly by carving rosaries, crucifixes, and 
 models of the Holy Sepulchre, in Avood, for sale. The Cave of the Nativity 
 lies on the east hill, under a " Church of St. Mary," first built by the 
 Emperor Constantino, but often renewed since. To this church there is 
 joined, on the north, the Latin cloister of the Franciscans, with the Church 
 of St. Catherine, which belongs to it, and, on the south, the Greek and the 
 Armenian cloisters. 
 
 The " Church of the Nativity " — venerable at least for its great age— is 
 Ijuilt in the form of a cross. The choir, two steps higher than the long 
 nave, includes the top and arras of the cross, and is divided from the nave 
 by a partition. A low door, in the west, leads, through the porch, to the 
 desolate and cheerless nave, with forty -four pillars, in seven rows, support- 
 ing the roof, the rough beams of which are uncovered, and look very bare 
 and dreary. The Greeks and Armenians have charge of this part, the 
 Latins being only allowed to pass through it to their cloister. The former 
 have altars in the choir ; that of the Greeks, which is consecrated to " the 
 three kings," standing in the centre, and showing, in a niche under it, a 
 star of white marble, marking the spot where the star of the wise men 
 stood in the heavens over Bethlehem ! The Cave of the Nativity is under 
 the altar, and is reached, from both sides of tlie clioir, by a flight of broad 
 and beautiful marble steps, respectively fifteen and thirteen in number. 
 The cave itself is about thirty-eight feet long, eleven broad, and nine liigli, 
 and is paved with black and red-veined marble. The sides are partly lined 
 with marble slabs, but some of these, on the north, have fallen off, and 
 show the bare wall, while, elsewhere, curtains of silk or linen are hung up 
 — the silk apjiarently only at festivals. From the roof hangs a row of 
 silver lamjjs, along the whole Iciigth of the cave. The site of the manger 
 itself is on the cast side of the grotto, in a rounded niche about eight feet
 
 THE MAGI. 87 
 
 high and four broad, in which an altar stands. The pavement of this 
 recess is a few inches higher than that of the cave, and is formed of 
 marble slabs on which there is a silver star, with sparkling rays, inlaid 
 with precious stones. Along the edge runs an inscription which no one 
 can read without emotion — " Hie de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus 
 est." — Here, Jesus Christ was born, of the Virgin Marj^ 
 
 South from this spot, in a corner, is a small separate cave, three steps 
 lower than the larger one, and in this stands the " Altar of the Manger " ; 
 but as the wooden manger which was exhibited in earlier times was taken 
 to Rome in I486 hj Pope Sixtus V., very little interest attaches now, even 
 on the ground of antiquity, to the crib of coloured marble shown in its 
 place. A painting of the Adoration of the Shepherds covers the rock 
 behind. Five silver lamps swing before this, and opposite is the " Altar 
 of the Magi," with another painting. It throws additional distrust 
 over all, except, perhaps, the central facts of the sj^ot, that a door from 
 the larger cave admits into a long, crooked,"rougli opening, like the galleiy 
 of a mine, in which are various altars, in recesses, natural, or formed by 
 man. You are shown the " Chapel of St. Joseph " ; then that of " The 
 Innocents," under the altar of which a squai'e latticed opening is said to 
 lead to the cave in which the bones of the murdered Innocents were 
 buried. From the Chapel of the Innocents you pass the altar of Eusebius 
 of Cremona, who lies there ; and in a cave at the west end of the gallery 
 you are shown the tombs of the holy Paula and her daughter Eustochium, 
 with that of their friend St. Jerome, whose cell — the scene of his wonder- 
 ful version of the Scriptures — is pointed out, a little beyond. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE MAGI. 
 
 THE two centuries in which Judea was a province of the Persian 
 Empire were, perhaps, the happiest time in the history of the Jewish, 
 nation. Enjoying perfect religious liberty, for which alone they cared, 
 they were loyal and contented. Nehemiah, the rebuilder of Jerusalem, 
 was at the same time a Persian pacha, and the people at large only 
 expressed their common fidelity to the power he represented, in alloAving, 
 with a liljcrality amazing in their case, a sculpture of Siisa, the Persian 
 metropolis, to be cut over one of the gates of the Temple. 
 
 The most striking characteristic of each nation furthered this mutual 
 respect. In Persia the highest form of Aryan religion had been brought 
 face to face with the highest form of Semitic, and there were many points 
 in which mutual symi^athy and regard were inevitable. Both nations hated 
 idolatry ; indeed, the Persian was more zealous in this than the Jew had 
 been, for there were not wanting, even in the exile, Jews who served idols. 
 In Ormuzd and Ahriman, — the personifications of Light and Darkness, or 
 Good and Evil,— the Persian, as it might seem, had only developed the
 
 88 THE LIFli OF CHRIST. 
 
 Jewish doctrine, of Jcliovali and the Evil that stvuggkd to counteract Ilis 
 beneficent rule. To the Persian, as to the Jew, his sacred books were the 
 weapon against darkness, and the guide to blessedness. They prescribed 
 commandments and supplied revelations. They taught a life after death, 
 and future rewards and punishments ; they disclosed the issue of the great 
 struggle between Good and Evil, and what would happen at the end of the 
 world. Times of great trial were to prove the faithful before the final day. 
 Their blood would flow like water. At the end of every millennium, how- 
 ever, Ormuzd would send a prophet, with a new revelation, and tlius a 
 reformation Avould be effected for the time. The prophet next to appear 
 would be born of a virgin, and after destroying the works of Ahriman, 
 would establish a happy kingdom for a thousand years. To aid him in 
 this, the most famous men of all times would appear in life again. At the 
 end of the millennium, the resurrection, it w'as taught, would take place, 
 through fifty-seven years. Then would begin the buruing-up of the w^orld 
 by fire : the mountains would sink, and the whole globe become like a sea 
 of molten metals. Through this all men must pass, to be purified from 
 the sins still cleaving to them ; but while the holy would do it with ease, 
 the wicked would suffer pain such as the same torments would have given 
 them during life. After this purification, even the formerly wicked would 
 be freed from evil. Ahriman and hell Avould be conquered and pass away; 
 there would remain only the great communion of the blessed, who live 
 with Ormuzd. 
 
 As regards this life, the Persians were taught that no man can remain 
 neutral, but must take the side either of good or evil. To follow the 
 former was not only right Ijut natural, since Ormuzd is the Creator. Yet 
 even he who chooses the right does not always receive his reward, for evil 
 is poAvcrful, and hinders Ormuzd, in many ways, from favouring his 
 servant here. The bad, by the help of Ahriman, may obtain prospcritj^ 
 and even secure the blessings designed for the good, but in the world to 
 come this will no longer be possible. As a man has lived on earth, so, 
 they believed, would be his reward or suffering in the life beyond. He 
 who has been good and pure, in thought, word, and deed, would be owned 
 as a servant of Ormuzd, and received into the fellowship of the spirits in 
 light, while he who had opposed Ormuzd here, would be driven down, in 
 the life hereafter, to dwell with Ahriman and his followers, in thick 
 darkness. The decision as to the class to which any one belongs would be 
 given according to his Avorks. On the third day after death, judgment, 
 they were taught, will be held, and every soul will have to jsass over a 
 bridge, where the ways to heaven and hell divide. Beside it sit the judges 
 of the dead and weigh the deeds of each soul in great scales. If the good 
 bear down the evil, the soul goes forward, over the bridge, to Paradise, 
 where it is welcomed, and has its dwelling till the Last Judgment. But 
 when a wicked soul presents itself, on the thiixl day after death, to try to 
 pass over, the bridge seems too narrow and slight, the footsteps totter, and 
 the soul falls into the dark abyss beneath. It is there received with 
 laughter and mockery by fiends, and tortured with the bitterest agonies 
 till the Day of Judgment.
 
 THE MAGI. 89 
 
 IIow fur this early creed retained its hold among the Persians in tho 
 days of the Captivity is not known, and there are no grounds for assuming 
 that the Jews were indebted to it, to any great extent, for the development 
 of their theology. The unity of Jehovah was in direct opposition to the 
 dualism of the Persian system. The Jewish conception of Satan, like 
 that of the resurrection, has its roots in the Old Testament, in which the 
 development of both may be traced. The doctrine of the resurrection, 
 indeed, seems hardly to have been among the old Persian popular beliefs, 
 though found in one place in the Avesta. Jewish ideas respecting angels, 
 good and bad, no doubt received an impulse from those of the Persians, 
 but, as a whole, the relation between the two theologies was mainly that 
 of independent similarity in some details. 
 
 But while the Jew borrowed very little from Persian sources, the exile, 
 — partly under Persian rule,— the two hundred years of Persian supremacy 
 in Judea, and the lasting connection between the Jews of the East and 
 their brethren in Palestine, must have created a deep interest, on both 
 sides, in faiths which had so much in common. 
 
 The extent to which Parseeism had spread iii the East, in the days of 
 Christ, cannot be known, but it had doubtless diffused itself, more or less, 
 over many regions, by the movements of men in these troublous times. 
 
 On the other hand, the knowledge of Judaism was by no means confined 
 to Palestine. The great bulk of the Jewish nation had never returned 
 from Babylon, but remained, in distinct communities, spread over the 
 surface of that empire. Their fidelity to their faith was proved by their 
 having supported the colony at Jerusalem till it no longer needed their 
 help. They looked to the Temple as their religious centre, contributed 
 largely to its funds, and received their ecclesiastical instructions from its 
 authorities. The Babylonian Jew prided himself on the iiurity of his 
 descent. What the Hebrews of Judea boasted they Averc, compared to 
 those of other countries, the Babylonian Hebrew claimed to be to tho 
 Judean — •" like pure flour compared to dough." From Babylon, the Jew 
 had spread through every region of the East, and wherever he went he 
 became a zealous missionary of his faith. Various causes had led to tho 
 same wide dispersion in the West, with the same result. The number of 
 [u-oselytes gained over the world by this propaganda was incredible. The 
 West was as full of Jews as the East. Egypt, and other parts of Africa, 
 had a vast Jewish population. To use the words of Josephus, the 
 habitable globe was so full of Jews, that there was scarcely a corner of the 
 Roman empire where they might not be found. The great synagogue at 
 Alexandria was so large that, if we can believe the Talmud, the Hazan, or 
 Reader, had to make use of a handkerchief, as a signal, when the congre- 
 gation Avere to repeat their "Amen." 
 
 Incidental proofs of the success of Jewish proselytisra are numei'ous. 
 Cicero, and Horace, Juvenal, Tacitus, and Seneca alike give vent to the 
 irritation everywhere felt, at the numbers of Greeks and Romans thus won 
 over to what they regarded as a hateful superstition. Exemption from 
 military service granted to the Jews, trade ])rivileges they si)ccially 
 enjoyed, marriage, and other inducements, swelled the list of proselytes ia
 
 90 THE LIFE or CHRIST. 
 
 every part. " The Jewish faith," says Seneca, " is now I'eceired over every 
 land : the conqnorcd have given laws to the conqueror." " This race," 
 says Dio Cassius, " has been repeatedly checked by the Romans, yet it 
 has increased amazingly, so that it has assumed the greatest boldness." 
 Joscphus tells us that in Antioch a great multitude of Greeks were 
 constantly coming forward as proselytes. Still further east, it was the 
 same, for St. Luke records that proselytes thronged to the feasts at 
 Jerusalem from provinces of the empire north of the Mediterranean, such 
 as Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, and Cappadocia; from Rome itself; 
 from its southern territories, such as Egypt, Arabia, Crete, and the parts 
 of Libya about Cyrene ; from its eastern extrcinities, and even from lands 
 beyond— Mesopotamians, Parthians, Medes, and Elamites,— dwellers in 
 the vast regions reaching from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, on the 
 north and south, and even further to the east. The infiuence of Judaism 
 extended into all lands. 
 
 Among the Jewish ideas diffused far and near by this universal agency, 
 none would find so easy and wide a circulation as that which, above all 
 others, filled the mind and heart of every Jew in that age — the expected 
 appearance of a great prince, of whom they spoke as the Messiah or 
 " Anointed." No indication of popular feeling can be more sure than 
 that supplied by the literature of a period ; and Jewish litei-ature, from the 
 date of Daniel to the age of Christ, was more and more completely Mes- 
 sianic. The Book of Enoch, the Jewish Sibylline books, the Psalter of 
 Solomon, the Ascension of Moses, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Fourth Book 
 of Esdras, the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan, and other writings of 
 later Judaism, strove to sustain and rouse the nation, in those dark days, 
 by prophetic anticipations of Messianic deliverance. Burning hope glows 
 through them, like fire through clouds, revealing the feverish concentration 
 of heart and thought of all Israel on this one grand expectation. 
 
 The restlessness of Judea was only another symptom of this universal 
 tension of the popular mind. Patriotic hatred of foreign rule, and religious 
 zeal against the introduction of heathen manners, kept the country in a con- 
 tinual ferment, which was heightened at every festival by assurances of 
 the Rabbis, priests, and fanatical " jirophets," that Jehovah would not much 
 longer endure the intrusion of the heathen into His own Land. This 
 temper of the people forced Herod to erect five times as many fortresses 
 in Judea as were required in Galilee ; and yet, in spite of them, the robbers 
 and bandits of the Judean hills never ceased to make war against the 
 existing government, in the name of Jehovah. Blind superstition reigned. 
 The bigoted masses were continually deceived by pretended Messiahs, who 
 led them, at one time, to the Mount of Olives, to see the walls of the now 
 heathen Jerusalem fall down at the word of the projohet ; at another, to 
 the Jordan, to pass through, dryshod, like their fathers ; at a third, as if 
 nothing could warn them, into the wilderness, to wait for the signs of the 
 Son of Man predicted by Daniel. What must have been the contagious 
 effect of such a state of things on the multitudes of Jews and proselytes 
 from every country, who yearly visited Jerusalem ? Josephus, perhaps 
 with some exaggeration, tells us that, at many feasts, there were not loss
 
 THE ilAGI. 91 
 
 than throe millions of pilgrims. How must tliey have spread over the 
 Tvhole earth the expectation of a great JeTvishkingAvho was to conquer the 
 world! for this the Messiah was to accomplish. It is no wonder thatJosephns, 
 Tacitus, and Suetonius should record the fact, though the Jewish historian 
 in mean flattery, and the others from the turn of affairs, applied it to 
 Vespasian. 
 
 It is, therefore, only what might have been expected, when St. Matthew 
 tells us that strangers from the East came, soon after His birth, to visit 
 the infant .Jesus. Any real or fancied occasion, which might lead to the 
 belief that the prince, so universally looked for, had actually appeared, 
 was well-nigh certain to call forth such an incident. 
 
 The simple notice given us throws no further light on these earliest 
 pilgrims from the great Gentile world, than is afforded by the title Magi, and 
 the intimation that they were led to undertake their journey to Bethlehem 
 by some mysterious appearances in the heavens. 
 
 The worship of the heavenly bodies had been established for immemorial 
 ages in the East, where the transparent atmosphere reveals the splendours 
 of the universe, both by night and day, with a glory unknown to duller 
 regions. In ages when science was yet unknown, and motion was every, 
 where assumed as the result of inherent life, it was almost inevitable to 
 regard the sun as the lord of day, and the moon and stars as ruling 
 the night. From this it was only a single step to superstition. " Magic," 
 as Professor Bastian observes, " is the physics of the children of nature." 
 It is the first step towards induction, and misleads, only by assuming that 
 accidental, or independent, coincidence or succession, is necessarily cause 
 and effect. Like children, men, in simple ages, jump to conclusions from 
 isolated observations, nor is the power of slow and careful generalization, 
 from a wide range of facts, attained, till very much later. 
 
 The phenomena of the daily and nightly heavens thus led very early, 
 in the East, to a belief in astrology ; the patient scientific faculty being 
 yet wanting which would, hereafter, develop that illusive science into 
 astronomy, as, in a later age, it raised alchemy into chemistry. The stars 
 were supposed, then, as they have been till recent times, to exercise 
 supreme influence over human life and the course of nature, and from this 
 belief a vast sj'stem of imaginary results was elaborated. The special 
 power of each star, alone or in conjunction with others, over health and 
 sickness, prosperity or trouble, life or death, the affairs of nations, and the 
 phenomena of nature, was supposed to have been discovered ; and this 
 power was believed to affect the future as well as the present. Diodorus 
 Siculus, who lived in the generation before Christ, says of the astrologers 
 of the East, " They think the noblest study is that of the five stars called 
 planets, which they call interpreters. This name they give them, because 
 other stars do not wander like them, but have a fixed course, while these 
 have paths of their own, and predict things to be ; thus interpreting to men 
 the will of the gods. For they say that they portend some things by their 
 rising, others by their setting, and still others by their colour, to those who 
 study them diligently. For, at one time, they say they foretell the violence 
 of storms ; at another the excess of rains or of heat, the appearance of
 
 92 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 comets, eclipses of the sun or moon, earthquakes, and indeed, every change 
 in the sky, either fortunate or the reverse, not only to nations and districts, 
 but to kings and common people." The position of the stars at a child's 
 birth was held to determine its future fate or fortune, and, hence, to cast 
 nativities early became one of the most important functions of astrologers. 
 
 This science was very early cultivated among the races inhabiting the 
 Mesopotamian plains. Like all higher knowledge in simple times, it was 
 in the hands of a priestly caste, known as Magi, a word which seems of 
 Aryan derivation. This order flourished among the Medes, Babylonians, 
 and Persians, but it is chiefly famous in connection with Persia, and seems 
 as if it had risen among the Aryan races, and had only mingled as a 
 foreign element in the Semitic civilization of Babylon. 
 
 We first meet the title as that of one of the Chaldean officials sent by 
 Nebuchadnezzar to Jerusalem — the Rabmag, or head of the Magi ; and in 
 the Book of Daniel, we find the caste divided into five classes, as the astro- 
 logers and dream interpreters of Babylon. Their origin, however, iden- 
 tified them with the purer faith of Persia, much more than with a corrupt 
 idolatry, and hence they especially flourished under the Persian rule. In 
 later times the name lost its early prestige, from the growth of lower 
 magical arts, practised as the order degenerated, so that, in the New 
 Testament, it is applied, excepting in the case of those who came to visit 
 the infant Saviour, only to two " sorcerers " — Simon Magus, and one Bar- 
 Jesus. 
 
 Soon after the presentation of our Lord in the Temple, a strange report 
 spread through Jerusalem. Members of the old priestly caste of Persia 
 had " come from the East," inquiring where they could find a new-born 
 King of the Jews, whose star, they said, they had seen in the East. It 
 was quite in keeping with Jewish belief to find indications of great events 
 in the appearances of the heavens, for their ancient Scriptures spoke of a 
 star that should come out of Jacob, and they had long referred the 
 prophecy to their expected Messiah. It was, indeed, universally believed 
 that extraordinary events, especially the birth and death of great men, 
 were heralded by appearances of stars, and still more of comets, or by 
 conjunctions of the heavenly bodies. Thus Suetonius tells us that at the 
 death of Ctesar " a hairy star shone continuously for seven days, rising 
 about the eleventh houi*,'' and Josephus relates that for a whole year 
 before the fall of Jerusalem a star, in the shape of a sword — doubtless a 
 comet — hung over the doomed city. A hundred and thirty years after 
 Christ's birth, a false Messiah, in Hadrian's reign, assumed the title of 
 Bar-Cochba^"the son of the star" — in allusion to the star to come out 
 of Jacob. The Jews had akeady, long before Christ's day, dabbled in 
 astrology, and the various forms of magic which became connected witli 
 it. They were skilled in mysterious combinations of letters and numbers, 
 which they used as talismans and amulets, to heal the sick, to drive aAvay 
 evil spirits, and bring frightful curses when wished, and they even 
 affirmed that some of their spells could draw the moon from heaven or 
 open the abyss beneath the earth. Such practices dated among them as 
 far back as the time of Alexander the Great. They were much given to
 
 THE MAGI. 93 
 
 cast horoscopes from the numerical value of a name. Everj-whcre through 
 the whole Roman empire, Jewish magicians, dream expounders, and 
 sorcerers, were found. Josephus ascribes the banishment of the Jews 
 from Rome to the acts of impostors of this kind. Nor did their superstition 
 stop here. They were skilled in the mysteries of astrology itself. " The 
 planets give wisdom and riches," says the Talmud, and it adds, in other 
 passages, — " The life and portion of children hang not on righteousness 
 but on their star." " The planet of the day has no virtue, but the planet 
 of the hour (of nativity) has much. Those who are born under the sun are 
 beautiful and noble-looking, frank and open ; those born under Venus, rich 
 and amatory ; under Mercury, strong in memory and wise ; under the 
 moon, feeble and inconstant ; under Jupiter, just ; under Mars, fortunate." 
 " The calculation of the stars is the joy of the Rabbi." In another passage, 
 indeed, a Rabbi tells an incjuirer that " there is no planet that rules Israel," 
 but the explanation added shows a pride that only a Jew could express — . 
 " The sons of Israel are themselves stars." Many Rabbis gave themselves 
 to astrology. 
 
 Belief in the influence of the stars over life and death, and in special 
 portents at the birth of great men, survived, indeed, to recent times. 
 Chaucer abounds in allusions to it. He attributes the great rain and the 
 pestilence of ISiS and 1350 to an extraordinary conjunction of Saturn with 
 other planets, and in the Man of Lawes Tale he says : — 
 
 "In sterres many a wynter therebyfore. 
 Was write the deth of Ector and AcLillca, 
 Of Pompe, Julius, cr they were i-bore ; 
 The stryf of Thebes, and of Ercules, 
 Of Sampson, Turnus, and of Socrates 
 The deth." 
 
 Still later, Shakespcre tells us— 
 
 " When beggars die there are no comets seen ; 
 The heavens themselves blaze forth the dealh of princes;" 
 
 and Bedford at Henry V.'s funeral is made to say — 
 
 " Comets, importing change of time and states. 
 Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky. 
 And with them scourge the bad revolting stars 
 That have consented unto Henry's death." 
 
 The special phenomena that led the Magi to undertake their journey have 
 been elsewhere stated. That successive conjunctions of three planets in 
 the sign of the Zodiac, Pisces, which was believed by the Jews to be that in 
 which a similar conjunction happened before the birth of Moses, and in 
 which another was to occur before the birth of the Messiah, sliould have 
 roused the attention of men to whom the motions of the planets were 
 revelations from heaven, was only natural. Doubtless they had heard in 
 their own country such a belief expressed by Jews, and traced to the \ 
 prophecy of Balaam, one of their own caste, and from their own parts. \' 
 When, in addition to such significant facts, at a time when all men were 
 looking for a great Jewish prince, a comet appeared soon after, nothing 
 could be more in keeping than that men, to whom such i)henomcna were
 
 94 THE L11''E OF CHRIST. 
 
 the voice of God, should set out to pay homage to the newborn King who 
 was to rule the world. 
 
 At the time when the Magi arrived, Herod, now an old man, was sinking 
 into tlie last stages of disease, but was still as jealous and afraid of 
 attemjots against his throne as ever. Its steps were wet with the blood of 
 his best-loved wife, his sons, his benefactor, and of the flower of the nation, 
 murdered to make it secure. Like our own William the Conqueror, or 
 Henry VIII., or like Alexander the Great, or Nero, or Tiberius, his 
 character had grown darker in his later years, and now, in his old age, he 
 sat alone in his new palace, — amidst splendour of architecture greater if 
 possible than that of the Temple, — lonely, hated and hating, his subjects 
 waiting impatiently, in veiled rebellion, for his deatli. In his own court, 
 shortly before, a plot had been discovered Avhich liad filled all Jerusalem 
 with commotion. The Pharisees, to the number of 6,000, had refused to 
 take the oath of allegiance, and their loaders, whom the people believed 
 gifted with the power of prophecy, had gone the length of asserting, that 
 God had determined that Herod and his family should be S]3eedily driven 
 from the throne, to make way for the Messiah. To secure the fulfilment 
 of this prediction, the influence of their firm supporter, the wife of 
 Pheroras, his brother, was used, to carry the plot inside the palace, among 
 the ladies of the court. Bagoas, the eunuch, as most easily approached, 
 from his connection with the harem, was made their tool, and, with him, a 
 youth named Cams, the loveliest person of his day, but loathsomely 
 immoral. Bagoas was won over to believe that he would be the father of 
 the coming Messiah, but Herod found out the whole, and the conspiracy 
 was quenched in blood. ISTo wonder that, as St. Matthew tells us, " he was 
 troubled, and all Jerusalem with him," when the news spread of strangers 
 having come on such an errand as that of tlie Magi. To Herod their arrival 
 was a fresh cause of jealous terror: to Jerusalem a possible ground of hope. 
 
 Herod had often before shown the craft bred by habitual suspicion, and 
 was too clever to take any rash steps now. Summoning the heads of the 
 priesthood and the " scribes " to his palace, he demanded of them where 
 Christ should be born. 
 
 Jewish theology had already determined, correctly, that the Messiah 
 was to be of the stock of Judah, which had from the first challenged the 
 headship of the tribes, and had been supreme since Ephraim's captivity 
 in Assyria. It boasted of David, the ancestor and the prototype of the 
 Messiah, and the words of Jacob that the " sceptre " should " not depart 
 from it, until Shiloh come," or, as it may be translated, from the Greek 
 version, "till he comes to whom the dominion belongs," had long been 
 understood to refer to the Messiah. "How fair is the King Messiah," 
 says the Targum on the passage, "who will rise from the house of 
 Judah ! " The words of Zechariah, " The Lord of Hosts hath visited the 
 house of Judah, and hath made them as His goodly horse in the battle," 
 are also applied by another Targum to the Messiah. "A king will rise 
 from the children of Jesse," says the same Targum elsewhere,"" and the 
 Messiah will spring from his children's children." Hence " the Son of 
 David " was a constant name for this expected Prince.
 
 THE MAGI. 95 
 
 As a descendant of David, Bethlehem, David's town, was naturally 
 regarded as the place of his birth, and hence the passage in Micah, 
 adduced by the priests and scribes, is also quoted by the Targums. " An 
 Arab said to a Jew at his plough," says the Talmud, " ' Your Messiah is 
 born ! ' ' What is his name ? ' asked the Jew. ' Menaheni, the son of 
 Hezekiah.' ' Where was he born ? ' asked the Jew again. * In the king's 
 castle at Bethlehem Judah,' answered the Arab." 
 
 Long before the birth of Christ, it had been felt that the time for the 
 advent of the Messiah was fulfilled, and his non-appearance even led to the 
 fanciful idea that he was already born, but kept himself hidden in some 
 unknown part. " We know this man whence he is,'' said the Jews, long 
 after, of Jesus, " but when the Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence He 
 is ! " " Thou, O anointed one of Israel," cries the Targum, " Thou who 
 art hidden on account of the sins of the people of Zion, Thine shall bo the 
 kingdom ! " 
 
 The prophecy of Balaam had led to the same belief among the Jews, as 
 amongst the Eastern Magi — that a great star would appear in heaven 
 when the Messiah came. " AVhen the Messiah is to be revealed," says the 
 book Sohar, "a star will rise in the east, shining in great brightness, 
 and seven other stars round it will fight against it on every side." " A 
 star will rise in the east which is the star of the Messiah, and will remain 
 in the east fifteen days." The rising of Bar-Cochl)a, " the son of the star," 
 was a terrible illustration of this belief. 
 
 To hear of Magi coming from the East— the country of Balaam, the 
 reputed founder of the caste, announcing the appearance of the star of the 
 Messiah, which they themselves expected, was, hence, fitted to rouse the 
 Rabbinical world of Jerusalem to the highest excitement. They had 
 already a wondrous estimate of the great soothsayer, for Philo, a contem- 
 joorary of Christ, speaks of him as "famous for his gift of prophecy." 
 '' He was skilled," says he, " in every branch of the black art. He had 
 learned the greatest names (names of angels and of God, to be used in 
 magic), through his knowledge of the flight of ])irds, and did much that 
 was wonderful by their means. He predicted rain in the hottest time of 
 summer ; heat and drought in the midst of winter ; iinf ruitfulness when 
 the fields were greenest ; plenty in years of famine, and the overflowing 
 or drying up of streams ; the removal of pestilence ; and a thousand other 
 things, the foretelling of which got him boundless fame, which spread 
 even to this." The Rabbis believed, indeed, that Balaam himself was a 
 Rabbi, who taught disciples the black art, and that the Magi, his suc- 
 cessors, knew his prophecy of the star of tlie Messiah, through the 
 tradition of his schools." 
 
 Having learned the expected birthplace of the Messiah, which he would 
 himself have known, had he been a Jew and not an Idumcan, Herod sent 
 for the Magi and made every inquiry, under the pretext that he, also, 
 wished to do homage to the young child. But very different thoughts 
 were in his heart. A descendant of David was not likely to be spared by 
 the man who had murdered the last of the Asnioneaus. The hope of tlie 
 world was not to perish thus, however, for the Magi having paid their
 
 96 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 visit to Betlilelicm, and presented gifts to Him, as all Easterns do ^\-hon 
 they come before princes or the great, a dream, sent from aliove, led tlicm 
 to return to tlieir own country without revisiting Jerusalem. 
 
 Balked in his purpose so far, Herod was not the man to stop at half- 
 measures. A few murders more were nothing. The most thorough 
 precautions must be taken. A band of soldiers was therefore sent to 
 Bethlehem with orders to kill every male child near the supposed age of 
 the infant ho dreaded. Josephus is silent about this slaughter, but this 
 needs not surprise us, for what was a single deed of blood, in a mountain 
 village, among the crimes of Herod ? Nor is it alone in the omissions of 
 the historian, for his whole history of the centuries after the Return omits 
 far more than it tells. 
 
 Joseph and Mary had left Bethlehem before this tragedy, and had fled 
 to the friendly shelter of Egypt, at a Avarning divinely given. How long 
 they remained there is not known. All Palestine was under Herod, so 
 that he could have reached them in any part of it, but in Egypt the 
 fugitives were safe. It was, moreover, almost another Judea, for the 
 favour shown to their race by the Ptolemies had induced as many as a 
 million of Jews to settle in the Nile Valley, and of the five quarters of 
 Alexandria, with 300,000 free citizens, Jews occupied more than two. 
 They had had a temple of their own at Leontopolis, in the Delta, for about 
 100 years, though they preferred to go up to that at Jerusalem ; the 
 Greek translation of the Bible, which had already widely taken the place 
 of the Hebrew original, had been made in Egypt, and the Egyptian 
 Rabbis, by their efforts to turn Judaism into a philosophic system which 
 should win it the favour of the cultivated Romans and Greeks, had 
 founded a new school of Jewish theology, which was, hereafter, to in- 
 fluence even Christianity. 
 
 It has been usual to suppose that Herod died in the spring of the j'ear 
 750 — that is, within a few months after the birth of Christ. But there 
 seem to be some reasons for believing that he lived till 753. 
 
 Josephus says that he died shortly before the Passover, and that an 
 eclipse of the moon happened not long before. In the year 750 such an 
 eclipse happened on the 13th of March; but if he died at the end of that 
 month, or in April, there must have been a crowding of events into the 
 short interval, beyond what seems possible. 
 
 It appears, however, that there was an eclipse of the moon on the night 
 of January the 10th, in the year 753, and it is urged that this suits the 
 facts much better, by giving three months instead of one for the incidents 
 mentioned by Josej^hus, even if Christ were born three years latei-, and by 
 leaving ample time for those related by Matthew and Luke. A passage 
 has been found in a Calendar of the Feasts, in the Talmud which seems 
 to support this later date. " The 1st Shebct (or 21-th of January) is a day 
 of double good fortune as the day of the death of Herod and of Jannai, 
 for it is joy before God when the wicked are taken from this world." If 
 this be right, the eclipse happened on the 10th of January, Herod's death 
 on the 21th, and there was ample time before April for the Ijurial and all 
 that followed, wliich must have required weeks.
 
 THE MAGI. 97 
 
 If, then, Herod bad yet nearly three years to live after the birth of 
 Christ, Mary and her husband must have stayed in Egypt that length of 
 time. Nor would it be difficult for Joseph to find support, as the difilerent 
 classes of Jewish workmen in Egypt were associated in guilds, which 
 maintained those out of employment, much as trades' unions do now. The 
 goldsmiths, the silversmiths, the nail-makers and needle-makers, the 
 coppersmiths, and the weavers, are specially mentioned as being banded 
 together in such associations, which supported any stranger of their 
 respective crafts till he found work. The workers in wood, in all probability, 
 had such a union as well ; and Joseph, moreover, though called a carpenter 
 in the Gospels, may have been more, for the word does not necessarily 
 mean a worker in wood only, but a waggon smith and other occupations 
 as well. In its Hebrew sense, it may mean, indeed, any kind of trade 
 which uses cutting instruments, and is employed indifferently of workers 
 in metal, wood, or stone. 
 
 Egypt, though thus filled with a Jewish population, was, however, no 
 land for Joseph and Mary, nor, above all, for the infant Jesus. ISTeithcr 
 the Greek inhabitants of the towns and cities, nor the Egyptian peasantry, 
 were very friendly to the strangers who, in hundreds of thousands, in- 
 truded into the Nile Valley. The old hatred between the land of Mizraim 
 and the sons of Israel seemed still, in some measure, to survive on both 
 sides. The Jews hated the Egyptian priesthood, with its worthless secrets 
 and its ridiculous symbols, and prided themselvL-s, as the prophets had 
 done of old, on their purer faith. They saw, in Egypt, the incarnation of 
 the most corrupt heathenism. The command, "Thou shalt make no like- 
 ness or graven image," was nowhere mocked to such an extent as on the 
 banks of the Nile. Even Philo makes the remark that the Egyptian 
 religion was the most grovelling of all forms of idolatry, since it did not 
 look to the heavens for objects of worship, but to the earth, and the slime 
 of the Nile, with its creatures. Josephus derides the system which wor- 
 shipped crocodiles and apes, vipers and cats ; and even the Eoman Juvenal 
 scoffed at a race who grew their divinities in their kitchen garden. The 
 Apostle Paul evidently had Egyptian heathenism in his mind when he 
 speaks of idolatry as running to the foul licence of changing the image 
 of the invisible God into the likeness of men, of birds, of four-footed 
 beasts, and creeping things. On the other hand, the Jews suffered 
 from the traditional hatred of their race by the Egyptians, in the 
 repetition of scandals and shameful calumnies against them, which had 
 survived since the Exodus. It was said that the children of Israel, 
 whom Moses led out of Egypt, were lepers, whom Pharaoh had banislied 
 from the country ; and Greeks and natives, catching at the bitter slander, 
 strove which should turn it, and others equally contemptuous, with most 
 effect, against their Jewish fellow-citizens, whom all equally disliked. 
 The very fact that the Eomans had granted special favours to the Jews, 
 and that they were rivals in trade, was, indeed, itself, sufficient to account 
 for such an attitude of acrid raillery and depreciation. Things had 
 at last come to open rupture, and the Jewish cominunity of Alexandria 
 (ooked forward only to ultimate expulsion and ruin. It is no wonder, 
 
 H
 
 98 THE LIFE OF GHEIST. 
 
 tlierefore, that Joseph and Mary sought to return as soon as possible to 
 their own country. 
 
 The Apocryphal Gospels are full of extraordinary miracles wrought by 
 the infant Jesus while in Egypt, and of legends respecting Him and Mary, 
 but none of them are worth reproducing. Memphis is commonly giveii as 
 the place where Joseph settled, and his stay is variously stated as having 
 lasted three years, two, or only one. 
 
 The star and the Magi have naturally given rise to many legends. The 
 country, the number, and the names of the illustrious visitors are as 
 entirely passed over by the Apocrypha as by the Gospels, but later 
 tradition abundantly atones for the omission. They were said to be the 
 kings of Sheba and Seba, in Arabia, come to offer gifts to His light and to 
 the brightness of His rising, but Persia, Chaldea, Ethiopia, and India, 
 have each had their advocates. It is equally undetermined in the legends 
 whether they were Jews or heathen, though most of the fathers favour 
 the idea that they were the latter, and the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy 
 represents them as worshipping fire, and as referring to a prophecy of 
 Zoroaster respecting the Messiah. Their three gifts led to the fancy that 
 they themselves were only three in number, which was supposed to corres- 
 pond to the three divisions of the earth as then known, Europe, Asia, and 
 Africa. Sometimes, however, they are spoken of as twelve, to correspond 
 with the Apostles, and their names given, with the special gift which 
 each presented. Their kingdoms also are mentioned, and their very ages, 
 which are made to represent youth, manhood, and grey hairs. Bede, 
 indeed, is able to tell us that Melchior was an old man, with long white 
 hair, and a sweeping beard, and that he gave the gold as to a king; that 
 Caspar was a beardless youth, with a ruddy face, aiid that he presented 
 the frankincense as a gift worthy the God ; while Balthasar was a swarthy 
 strong-boarded man, and gave the myrrh for the burial. In the cathedral 
 at Cologne, visitors may yet see the supposed skulls of the three, set in 
 jewels, and exhiljited in a great gilded shrine. They are said to have been 
 discovered by Bishop Reinald of Cologne in the twelfth century. 
 
 Imagination has been equally busy with the star. The Arabic Gospel 
 of the Infancy says it was an angel in the form of a star, and several of 
 the Fathers were of the same opinion. Origcn believed it to have been a 
 comet. One tradition is beautiful. In the farthest East, it says, lived a 
 people who had a book which bore the name of Seth, and in this was 
 written the appearance of the star of the Messiah, and the ofEering of gif Ls 
 to Him. This book was handed down from father to son, generation after 
 generation. Twelve men were chosen who should watch for the star, and 
 when one died, another was chosen in his place. These men, in the speech of 
 the land, were called Magi. They went, each year, after the wheat- 
 harvest, to the top of a mountain, which was called the Mountain of 
 Victory. It had a cave in it, and was pleasant by its springs and trees. 
 At last the star appeared, and in it the form of a little child, and over him 
 the sign of a cross ; and the star itself spoke to them, and told them to go 
 to Judea. For two years, which was the time of their journey, the star 
 moved before them, and they wanted neithov food nor drink, Gregory of
 
 NAZAEETH, AND THE EARLY DAYS OP JESUS. 99 
 
 Tours adds that the star sank, at last, into a spring at Bethlehem, where 
 he himself had seen it, and where it still may be seen, but only by pure 
 maidens. 
 
 The Gospel of Matthew, which was written for the Jewish Christians of 
 Palestine, has for its primarj' aim the proof that Jesus was the promised 
 Messiah, and as nothing would weigh so much in the minds of men trained 
 in Jewish ideas, as evidences from their own Scriptures, it abounds with 
 quotations from them to show how prophecy was fulfilled in our Saviour. 
 There are five such quotations in the first two chapters, some of which 
 would not perhaps have struck us, of themselves, as primarily bearing on 
 the Messiah. In Christ's day, a system of allegorizing was in vogue with 
 the Rabbis of the various Jewish schools, as it afterwards came to be in 
 the Christian Church, and this, though familiar to those for whom the 
 Gospel was first written, is not so much so to us. How far, in some cases, 
 it is intended to be understood that the passages quoted, originally referred 
 to the events to which they are applied, has been a subject of much con- 
 troversy, for the sacred writers themselves evidently intend them to be 
 understood, in some instances, as a divine fulfilment of prophecy, but, in 
 others, only as an illustration and parallel. Perhaps the rule laid down by 
 Tholuck is as nearh^ right as any. " Whore parallels are adduced in the 
 New Testament," says he, " from the Old, whether it be in words of 
 the prophets, or in institutions or events, it is to be taken for granted, in 
 general, that the intention was we should regard them as divinely 
 designed. On the contrary, there are other cases, as for example, 
 Matthew ii. 17, where the phrase 'that it might be fulfilled' is not used, 
 but only 'then.' In these the sacred writer is to be regarded as following 
 the custom of his day, by expressing his own thoughts in the words of 
 Scripture. 
 
 Jn 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 NAZATlEXn, AND THE EAELY DAYS OF JESUS. 
 
 THE exceeding difficultj^ of telling the story of a life like that of Jesus 
 Christ, a man and yet divine, one having all power given Him in 
 heaven and in earth, and yet like other men in all respects except sin, is 
 at once evident, on the least reflection. Indeed, it is not so much difficult 
 as impossible, to tell it as such conditions demand, for human intellect 
 can only comprehend the created, not the Creator. The Eternal still dwells 
 in thick darkness ; no eye hath seen or can see Him : His very attributes 
 utterly transcend our comprehension. In Jesus Christ, as at once God 
 and Man, we have opposite conceptions which we may humbly receive, but 
 can neither harmonize, explain, nor adequately express. Man, as such, is 
 not almighty, but frail as a flower ; not omniscient, but, even at his highest 
 wisdom, a child on the shore of the Infinite ; not omnipresent, but fixed at 
 any given moment to one minute spot. We cannot conceive what is 
 implied in a nature of which almighty power, omniscience, and omni-
 
 100 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 presence are attributes : far less present them, adequately, in words, as 
 
 % united with human weakness and local limitation. The Man Christ Jesus 
 
 ■' may be realized. His acts and words may be related ; His divine powers 
 
 I may be illustrated by their recorded exhibitions, and there may be the 
 
 ■' most sincere admission of His highest claims ; but the narrative must still 
 
 \ inevitably, as a whole, be that of the human side of His nature only.^ 
 
 \ It seems necessary to remind the reader of this at the point which we 
 
 have reached, to prevent misconceptions. We yield to none in reverence 
 
 ;■ to Jesus Christ as "God manifest in the flesh"; but the mystery of a 
 
 j nature which could be thus described must ever remain beyond the power 
 
 ■ of adequate presentation in any narrative of His earthly life. 
 
 Having heard of Herod's death, Joseph determined to return to Pales- 
 tine, with the intention of settling permanently at Bethlehem. On reach- 
 ing Judea, however, and finding Archelaus had been appointed ethnarch, 
 the dread of one who, of all the family, was believed to be most like the 
 hated tyrant, his father Herod,— the tumults and massacres in Jerusalem 
 at his accession, and the chronic disturbance of the country, induced him to 
 choose his former place of residence, in Galilee, instead. 
 
 In Nazareth, he was still under the rule of another of Herod's sons, 
 Herod Antipas — a man of no higher principle than his brother, as his 
 shameless life abundantly proved, but less likely to be goaded into violent 
 acts towards his people, from receiving less irritation at their hands than 
 Archelaus had to bear at those of the fiercely orthodox population of 
 Judea. With the exception of the dead Antipater, moreover, Archelaus 
 I was the most tyrannical and self-willed of the sons of Herod, and he was 
 not at all unlikely to follow up the suspicious cruelty of his father, which 
 had led to the Bethlehem massacre, should any hint betray the return of 
 1 the supposed rival to his dominions. Herod Antipas, on the other hand, 
 was far less likely to trouble himself about any claimant of the throne of 
 Judea, a province unconnected with his government. Thus, Nazareth 
 became, once more, a year or two before the commencement of our pre- 
 sent era, the habitation of the infant Jesus. Here He was to spend all 
 His future life, except part of its last few years. 
 
 Nazareth lies among the hills, which extend for about six miles between 
 the plains of El Battauf on the north, and Esdraelou on the south. It is 
 on the north side of the latter, and ovcT'looks one of the numerous little 
 folds or bays of the great plain, which are seen wherever the hills open. 
 The village lies on the northern side of this green bay, and is reached by 
 a narrow, steep, and rough, mountain jiath, over which the villagers have 
 to bring their harvests laboriously from the plain beneath, on camels, 
 mules, and donkeys. If the traveller ride up this path in March, when 
 Palestine is in its glory, he will be charmed by the bright green of the 
 plains and the beauty of the flowers, everywhere lighting up the otherwise 
 barren hills, which, at best, yield scanty pasture for sheei^ and goats. 
 The red anemone and the pink phlox are the commonest ; rock roses, 
 white and yellow, are plentiful, with a few pink ones ; the cytisus here 
 and there covers the ground with golden flowers, and the pink convol- 
 vulus, marigold, wild geranium, and red tulip, are varied by several
 
 NAZARETH, AND THE EARLt DAYS OF JESUS. 101 
 
 kinds of orchis — the asphodel, tlie wild garlic, mignonette, salvia, pim- 
 poniel, and white or pink cyclamen. As the path ascends, the little 
 fertile valley beneath, running cast and west, gradually opens to about a 
 quarter of a mile in breadth, covered with fields and gardens, divided by 
 cactus hedges, and running into the hills for about a mile. Near the 
 village, beside the pathway, about an hour from Esdraelon, is a spring, 
 from which the water pours from several taps in a slab of masonry, fall- 
 ing into a trough below, for camels, horses, asses, and cattle. 
 
 The distant view of the village itself, in spring, is beautiful. Its streets 
 rise, in terraces, on the slopes, towards the north-west. The hills, here 
 and there broken into perpendicular faces, swell above it, in an amphi- 
 theatre round, to a height of about five hundred feet, and shut it in from 
 the bleak winds of winter. The flat-roofed houses, built of the yellowish- 
 white limestone of the neighbourhood, shine in the sun with a dazzling 
 brightness, from among gardens, and fig-trees, olives, cypresses, and the 
 white and scarlet blossoms of the orange and pomegranate. A mosque, 
 with its graceful minaret, a large convent, from whose gardens rise tall 
 cypresses, and a modest cluirch, are the princijaal buildings. The streets 
 are narrow, poor, and dirty, and the shops are mere recesses on each side 
 of them, but the narrowness shuts out the heat of the sun, and the minia- 
 ture shops are large enough for the local trade. Numbers of dogs which 
 belong to the place, and have no owner, lie about, as in all Eastern towns. 
 Small gardens, rich in green clumps of olive-trees and stately palms, 
 break the monotonous yellow of the rocks and houses, while doves coo, 
 and birds of many kinds twitter, in the branches, or flit across the open. 
 The bright colours of the roller, the hoopoe, the sunbird, or the bulljul, 
 catch the eye as one or other darts swiftly past, and many birds familiar 
 in England are seen or heard, if the traveller's stay be lengthened, for of 
 the 322 birds found in Palestine, 172 are also British. The song of the 
 lark floods a thousand acres of sky with melody ; the restless titmouse, 
 the willow-wren, the blackcap, the hedge-sparrow, the whitethroat, or the 
 nightingale, flit or warble, on the hillside, or in the cactus hedges, while 
 the rich notes of tlie song-thrush or blackbird rise from the green clumps 
 in the valley beneath. The wagtail runs over the pebbles of the brook 
 as here at home ; the common sparrow haunts the streets and house-tops ; 
 swallows and swifts skim the hill-sides and the grassy meadows; and, in 
 winter, the robin redbreast abounds. Great butterflies flit over the hill- 
 sides, amongst the flowers, while flocks of sheep and goats dot the slopes 
 and the little plain below. Through this a brook ripples, the only one in 
 tlie valley, and thither the women and maidens go to fetch water in tall 
 jars, for household use. It is the one spring of the town, and, hence, must 
 have been that which the mothers and daughters of Christ's day fre- 
 quented. It rises under the choir of the present Greek church, and is led 
 down the hill-side in a covered channel. An open space near the church 
 is the threshing-floor of the village, where, after harvest, the yoked oxen 
 draw the threshing-sledges slowly, round and round, over the grain, in 
 the open air. No Avonder that in sjiring Nazareth should have been thought 
 a paradise, or that it should be sjjoken of as perhaps the only spot in
 
 102 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Palestine where the mind feels relief from the unequalled desolation that 
 reigns nearly everywhere else. 
 
 Later in the year, the hills around lose the charm of their spring flowers. 
 They are then grey and barren, divided by dry gullies, with no colour to 
 relieve their tame and common-place outlines, the same on every side. 
 But even then, the rich hues at sunset, with its tints reflected from the 
 rocks, the long-drawn shadows of afternoon, and the contrasts of light 
 and dark on a cloudy day, give frequent charms to a landscape in 
 itself unattractive. 
 
 Nazareth lies nearly twelve hundred feet above the sea, and some of the 
 hills which cluster round, and shut it in, rise, as has been said, about five 
 hundred feet higher. It is a mountain village, only to be reached from 
 the plain by a tedious climb. 
 
 The Nazareth hills are of different kinds of white limestone. A thick 
 bed of this rock — containing flints, and merging, above, into the marl 
 which is still found at Nablus, and into a more thinly bedded soft lime- 
 stone beneath — originally covered the whole country, from Samaria to 
 Nazareth. This stone, though hard when exposed to the air, is so soft, 
 where fresh, that it can be cut like chalk. Beneath it lies hard dolomitic 
 limestone. The hills are the remains of these different rocks, after 
 denudation through a long geological period, their strata being more or 
 less disturbed by volcanic upheaval and contortion. Three centres of 
 eruptive outbursts are visible in the neighbourhood of Esdraelon — one in 
 the range of Gilboa, on the south-east ; another at Little Hermon, between 
 Gilboa and Tabor ; and the third in the south-eastern part of the Carmel 
 range, at Jebel Iskander— no fewer than twenty-nine outbursts of basalt, 
 on the east, west, and north of the plain, marking their former activity. 
 The limestone beds arc everywhere more or less tilted up by this volcanic 
 energy. The rich dark soil of Esdraelon has been formed from the 
 wearing down of the basalt which now forms part of some of the neigh- 
 bouring hills, and from strata of volcanic mud derived from it. The 
 smaller plains of Palestine are of a more clayey soil, the hills round them 
 being of limestone or basalt, presenting, at times, sudden and precipitous 
 cliffs, and the original soft, chalky limestone remaining still on their 
 tops. 
 
 The free air of their mountain home seems to have had its effect on the 
 people of Nazareth. Its bright-eyed happy children and comely women 
 strike the traveller, and even their dress differs from that of other parts. 
 Through Palestine generally, the frequent and excessive changes of 
 climate expose the peasants, or the fellahin, to rheumatism, coughs, and 
 bronchitis ; and, as a j^rotection, the men in many parts wear a sheepskin 
 coat, on Avarm days as Avell as cold. The women, however, make no change 
 in their dress, which usually consists of nothing but a lonsr blue earment 
 tied m round the waist, a bonnet of red cloth, decorated with an edginsr or 
 roll of silver coins, bordering the forehead and extending to the ears, re- 
 minding one of the crescent-shaped female head-dress worn by some of 
 the Egyptian priestesses. Over this, a veil or shawl of coarse white cot- 
 ton is thrown, which hangs down to the waist, serving to cover the
 
 NAZARETH, Als'D THE EARLY DATS OF JESUS. 103 
 
 mouth, while the bosom is left exposed, for Eastern and Western ideas 
 of decorum differ in some thin 2:3. 
 
 The peoi)lc of the plain of Esdraelou are different. Their dark skins, bright 
 eyes, white teeth, and wonderful taste in the combination of the brightest 
 colours, draw the attention. Nothing more picturesque could be desired 
 than the women, in their red veils, and long pointed sleeves, carrying 
 water ; the dark camel-drivers, in black head-dresses, and striped brown 
 and white abbas, riding on diminutive donkeys, before the train of clumsy, 
 swinging, dull-coloured camels ; the rich sheikh, in a purple jacket, scarlet 
 boots, thin white cloak, and yellow head-dress ; his grey mare, with a 
 scarlet saddle, set off by long brown tassels at its peaks ; alternating with 
 the herds of black goats and diminutive red oxen. 
 
 The various costumes which seem peculiar to Nazareth are not less 
 striking. The short abba or cloak of the men, and their gorgeous kefiyehs, 
 or kerchiefs, folded triangularly and thrown over the head, so as to fall 
 over the neck and shoulders ; the white veil, the silk dresses, the broad 
 scarves, and many-coloured trousers, red, green, blue, and yellow, of 
 the women, give the wearers a peculiarly picturesque appearance, and 
 differ materially from the sordid dresses of the poorer southern villages. 
 In a country where nothing changes, through age after age, the dress of 
 to-day is very likely, in most respects, the same as it was two thousand 
 years ago, though the prevailing colour of the Hebrew dress, at least in 
 the better classes, was the natural white of the materials employed, which 
 the fuller made even whiter. 
 
 One charactftTistic of the hills round Nazareth existing already in 
 Christ's day, and, indeed, much earlier, is a striking proof of the denseness 
 of the population of Palestine in former times, and of its restless industry 
 and energy. Many of them are honeycombed with countless excavations 
 of various kmds. Cemeteries of over two hundred tombs cut in the 
 soft rock, some of them large tunnelled vaults, with separate hollows for 
 twelve todies ; large numbers of Cisterns, grape and olive presses, store 
 or dwelling caves, wells and quarries, are everywhere abundant, as, 
 indeed, they are over the whole country, but especially in the Shephejah or 
 Philistine plain. The cisterns are from twenty to thirty feet deep, shaped 
 like a church bell or inverted funnel, about two and a half feet across at the 
 mouth, and fifteen to twenty-five at the bottom, the whole cut out of the 
 solid limestone, showing that Palestine must always have been, for a good 
 part of the year, a waterless country, needing to store up the rains of 
 autumn and spring. It is not uncommon to find groups of from three to 
 ten, or even more, of these fine excavations together. What must have 
 been the density of the population, what its civilization and industry, to 
 leave such remains in such numbers ? 
 
 The Nazareth hills are, for the most part, neglected now, but were 
 utilized in Christ's day as the hill-sides along the Rhine, or the lime- 
 slopes of Malta are at present, by terrace cultivation. Traces of these 
 ancient terraces may still be seen. All the loose stones were gathered and 
 built into rough walls along the sides of the hills, like so many steps, as at 
 Bethlehem still. The tops of the strips thus gained, after being levelled,
 
 lOi a:iIE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 produced grapes and all kinds of fruit in great abundance. The support- 
 ing walls, liaving been long neglected, have fallen down, and well-niglx 
 disappeared ; the earth once behind them has been washed away by the 
 heavy rains, and tlie slopes, except in spring, when the flowers are in their 
 glory, show little biit barren rock. 
 
 The view from ISTazareth itself is limited, as might be expected from its 
 nestling in an amphitheatre of hills that shut in the little valley, except to 
 the west, where it opens on Esdraelon. From the top of the hill at the 
 back of the village, to the north, however, it is very different. Galilee 
 lies spread out like a map at one's feet. The eye wanders over the plain 
 of Esdraelon in its broad western sweep. Three hours to the east, it rests 
 on the round outline of Tabor, with its woods of oaks and pistachios, and, 
 beyond it, on the swelling mass of Jebel el Dahy, or Little Hermon, which 
 closes-in the i:)lain, at about the same height as Tabor. Ranging south- 
 wards, the mountains of Gilboa, four or five hundred feet lower, shut in 
 the lowlands ; while far beyond them, across the hidden course of the 
 Jordan, rise the mountains of Gilead. Looking to the south, across 
 Esdraelon, the hills of Samaria are seen, through the openings of the 
 wooded heights of the Carmel range, reaching northward to join it. 
 Turning slowly towards the west, the whole length of the Carmel hills, 
 running thirty miles north-west, to the coast, seem, in the pure air of 
 these parts, as if close at hand. About twenty miles off, almost directly 
 Avest, rises the headland of Carmel ; its top crowned with woods of oaks 
 and fig-trees, its slopes varied with orchards, laurels, and olives, and its 
 seaward face sinking abruptly into the Mediterranean waters. Is'cstling 
 at the northern base of the hill, on the sea-shore, the white houses of 
 Haifa arrest the eye. The blue waters, specked with sails, stretch far 
 awa}', beyond, to the distant horizon. The whole Bay of Acre is seen, 
 though Acre itself lies too low to be visible. The brown sandy shores, 
 sweeping far to the north, are hidden only here and there, by intervening 
 hills. Leaving the coast, and looking from north-west to north, the 
 panorama shows a sea of hills— the highlands of Galilee, — broken by the 
 fertile upland plain of Buttauf, close at hand, with the ruins of the once 
 famous Sepphoris, on a solitary hill at its southern edge, and beyond, on 
 its northern slope, the cottages of Cana of Galilee. In the background, 
 twenty miles away, tower the hills of Safed, 2,770 feet above the sea, 
 rising over the ever-heightening summits of the highlands of Upper 
 Galilee. But Safed itself is only midway in the landscape. Mountains 
 rise beyond mountains, to the north, till they culminate more than sixty 
 miles off, as the crow flies, in the highest peaks of Hermon, ten thousand 
 feet above the sea-level. As the eye wanders round to the point from 
 which it began its survey, hills beyond hills still meet the view, stretch- 
 ing away, Avith rounded tops, towards the Sea of Galilee, and rising again, 
 beyond it, to a greater height on its eastern shores. 
 
 In the town of Nazareth, then doubtless much larger, Jesus spent most 
 of His life. Amidst those hills, in these streets. He was brought up as a 
 child ; and " grew," as a bo}^ " in wisdom and stature." Here, for many 
 years, He laboured as a man for His daily bread. This was the landscape
 
 NAZARETH, AND IllE EAKLY DAYS OV JESUS. 105 
 
 oil which He daily gazed, and it Avas along these mountain paths He 
 walked. He must often have stood on the hill-top from Avhich the whole 
 country is seen, and the little bay of the great i)lain below the village, 
 with its encircling heights, must have been familiar to Him in its least 
 detail. If there bo a spot to which a Christian pilgrim might rightly turn 
 as the most sacred in the history of his faith, it is Nazareth. 
 
 The influence of such a home on the character of its jjeople must have been 
 marked. Less lovely, perhaps, than the plain of Genuesarcth, on the other 
 side of the hills on the north-east, it was yet a j^lace fitted alike by the 
 dreamy quiet of its environment of heights, the surpassing view from the 
 hill above it, the beauty of earth and sky, and the soul-inspiring purity of 
 its mountain air, to form true-hearted and generous children of nature, 
 quick in intellect, bright in imagination, and noble in higher character- 
 istics. Yet, with all its seclusion, the position of Nazareth checked any 
 narrow onesidedness. The wonderful landscape from its hill-top made 
 this impossible. The great, rich, Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee, at once 
 a town and a fortress, was scarcely three hours distant, Tiberias was only 
 eight, and a crown of populous villages rose on all sides, around. The 
 great high road — known even in the days of Isaiah as " the way of the 
 sea" — ran across the plain of El Buttauf, just behind Nazareth, from 
 Damascus to Ptolemais. Another caravan road, from Damascus to Judea 
 and Egypt, crossed Esdraelon at the foot of the Nazareth hill, meeting a 
 third, from the north, at Megiddo, on the other side of the plain. The 
 Roman road from Syria, moreover, after passing through Berytus, Sidon, 
 Tyre, and Ptolemais, on the coast, ran, by way of Sepphoris, through 
 Nazareth, to Samaria, Jerusalem, and the south. Nazareth was, thus, at 
 the crossiieg place of the nations, where commerce or military changes 
 gave daily familiarity with all the neiglibouring races — the Syrian, the 
 Phenician, the Arab, and the Eonian ; and where there was so much inter- 
 course, there must have been greater liberality of mind than in other parts 
 of Jewish territory. 
 
 It has been usual to think of Nazareth as a rough and fierce place, with 
 a doubtful character even for morals. The rejection of its greatest Son 
 by His fellow-townsmen has been thought to show their rude coarseness ; 
 but Jesus offers a milder explanation — that a prophet has no honour in 
 his own country. Yet, even in rejecting Him, only a rough and coarse 
 people would have acted so rudely. The exclamation of Nathanael seems 
 to imply the doubtful morality of the town, perhaps from its position in 
 the midst of constant heathen traffic on the great roads ; and this appears 
 to correspond with the other notices of it in the Gospels. If it were so, it 
 would only heighten the wonder that such a shoot should grow from 
 ground so dry ! 
 
 Of the first thirty years of Christ's life we know nothing except the one 
 incident of His visit to Jerusalem, with Joseph and Mary, when a boy of 
 twelve years old. It is not difficult, however, to imagine at least some of 
 the influences which must have had their part in the development of that 
 "wisdom" in which He "grew," as His childhood and boyhood passed away. 
 
 "It must be granted," says Ewald, "that in no ancient people has
 
 106 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 family life maintained itself so powerfully as in Israel, during the early 
 days of the outward strength of the nation, or with so little weakening and 
 detei'ioration as during the period of its gradual decline." In their 
 patriarch Isaac and his Avife Eebecca, they had an abiding ideal which it 
 seemed the highest felicity to copy. Woman, among the Jews, was never 
 so dependent and despised as among other Eastern races, for the Law 
 proclaimed that she was bone of man's bone, and flesh of his flesh, and de- 
 signed to be a help meet for him. In the picture of Eve as the one wife 
 of Adam polygamy was indii'ectly censured, and it was no less so in the 
 command given in Eden, that " a man should leave his father and mother 
 and cleave unto his wife, and that they should be one flesh." Hence it 
 was never in much favour among the Jews, and gradually gave place to 
 the original law. Indeed, it was at any time rather a feature of royal or 
 princely ostentation than a characteristic of ordinary life. 
 
 The Book of Proverbs throws great light on the position of women in 
 Israel, and, incidentally, on her place and occupations in the household- 
 "A gracious woman," we are told, "retaineth honour; " "a wise woman 
 buildeth her house," that is, establishes her family; and "the price of a 
 virtuous woman is set far above that of rubies." Instead of beingj the 
 playthings or slaves of men, women are taught that they may be his 
 helpers and noblest friends. " The heart of the husband of the virtuous 
 woman," says King Lemuel, 
 
 " Doth safely trust in her, so that he shall not want for gain. 
 She will do him good and not harm all the days of her life. 
 She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh with diligent hands. 
 She is like the merchant ships ; she bringeth her food from afar. 
 She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household. 
 And the day's work to her maidens. 
 She considercth a field and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she 
 
 plantetli a vineyard. 
 She girdcth her loins with strength, and maketh strong her arms. 
 She sees that her trading yields good profit : her lamp is kept burning by 
 
 nis-ht. 
 She lays her hands on the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. 
 She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands 
 
 to the needy. 
 She is not afraid of the snow for her household ; for all her children are 
 
 clothed with scarlet wool. 
 She maketh herself robes : her clothing is silk and purple. 
 Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of 
 
 the land. 
 She maketh fine linen, and selleth it ; and delivereth girdles unto the 
 
 merchant. 
 Strength and honour are her clothing ; and she smiles at days to come. 
 She opcneth her mouth with wisdom ; and in her tongue is the law of 
 
 kindness. 
 She looketh well to the ordering of her household, and eateth not the 
 
 bread of idleness.
 
 NAZAEETH, AND THE EAELY DAYS OF JESUS. 107 
 
 Her sons rise up and praise her ; her husband also, and he extols her ; — 
 ' Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.' 
 Gracefulness is deceitful, and beauty is a breath, but a woman that fears 
 
 Jehovah, she shall be praised. 
 Give her the honour that the fruit of her hands deserves ; her works are 
 
 the praise of all, in the gates." 
 
 ISTo literature of any age offers a finer ideal of the Wife and Mother than 
 this Hebrew poem, written not less than two thousand five hundred years 
 ago, when the history of Greece was still the era of fable, and Eome was 
 little more than a rude fort on the top of the Palatine hill. That it is a 
 sejiarate poem, inserted in this collection of Proverbs, is seen from its 
 construction, each verse beginning with the successive letters of the 
 Hebrew alphabet, in regular order, with the design, no doubt, of helping 
 the memory to retain it. For hundreds of yeai's before Mary's day it had 
 been on the lips of many Jewish maidens, for the words of the sacred 
 ))ooks were familiar to the whole Jewish race, as no part of any other 
 literature, so far as we know, has ever been to any people. The picture of 
 loving fidelity, ceaseless industry, prudence, management, charity, thrift, 
 wisdom, self-respect ; of noble reverence, rising from the husband on 
 earth to God above, and of motherly virtues towards her children, must 
 have kindled high aspirations in many a Jewish wife. It cannot be wrong 
 to believe that, in her sphere, Mary realized this ideal, both in her activi- 
 ties and in her character, and that it had its share in the spiritual develop- 
 ment of her wondrous child. 
 
 The relation of the Jewish husband to his wife was equally striking. If 
 he were her Isaac, she was his Rebecca. " A good wife is a great gift of 
 God," says the son of Sirach, "to him that fears God is she given." 
 " Joy to the man who has such a wife," says he again, " for the number of 
 his days is doubled." " Honour your wife, that you may be rich in the 
 joy of your home," says the Talmud. " Is your wife little ? " says another 
 Jewish proverb, also quoted in the Talmud, " then bow down to her and 
 speak" — that is, do nothing without her advice. "In eating and drink- 
 ing," says a Rabbi, "let a man keep within his means; in his own dress 
 let him spend as his means allow; but let him honour his wife and children 
 to tlie very edge of his power, for they are dependent on him, but he him- 
 self is dependent on God whose word made the world." The humour that 
 marks the Jew in all ages made a butt of the man who, contrary to the 
 better feeling of his people, ventui'ed to take two wives. " Bald here, and 
 bald there," says a Jewish proverb, in allusion to one who had two wives 
 one young and one old. The young one, said Jewish wit, pulled out the 
 white hairs, and the old one the black, till his head was as smooth as an 
 ivory ball ! 
 
 The reverence of children towards their parents Avas carried to the 
 sublime in Hebrew families. The child found the ideal of his obedience 
 in Isaac's willingly yielding himself to death at his father's command. 
 Every young Hebrew heard, from his earliest years, how the finger of God 
 Himself had written on the taljles of stone, " Honour thy father and tliy 
 mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God
 
 103 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 givcth tlice ; and this command he found repeated again and again in the 
 sacred Law. Disobedience to a father or mother was made a public 
 crime, which the community might punish with death. Unworthy cliil- 
 dren were laid under the most awful threatenings of divine displeasure. 
 Childhood read hoAV Joseph, " when he met his father, fell on his neck and 
 wept a good while," and " bowed himself to the earth before him," and 
 how the great lawgiver " did obeisance to his father-in-law and kissed 
 him." It knew the curse that fell on the son of ISToah who failed in 
 respect to his father, and read that the young were to " rise up before the 
 hoary head, and honour the face of the old man." The tender care of an 
 aged parent was regarded by every Jew as a sacred duty. The son of 
 Sirach only repeated the sentiment of all Scripture when he said, " Honour 
 thy father with thy whole heart, and forget not the sorrows of thy mother. 
 Remember that thou wast begotten of them ; and how canst thou recom- 
 pense them the things that they have done for thee?" That a father 
 and a mother's blessing was prized as sacred, and its being withheld re- 
 garded as the saddest loss, shows how deeply such teaching had sunk into 
 the Jewish mind. 
 
 Family life, resting thus on the holiest duty and reverence, has been 
 nowhere, in any age, more beautiful than it was, and still is, among the 
 Jews. In the parents, moreover, the passionate love of offspring, charac- 
 teristic of the race, doubtless hallowed these lofty sanctions. The children 
 of a Jewish household were the centre round which its life and love moved. 
 Full of affection and sensibility, the heart of a Jew was not content with 
 loving only those of his own generation, but yearned to extend itself to 
 others who would inherit the future. A childless marriage was the 
 bitterest trial. The Rabbis went even so far as to say that childless 
 parents were to be lamented as one would lament the dead. The purity 
 of Jewish family life was proverbial even in antiquity. The surpassing 
 morality of the ancient Scriptures, and the illustrations of ideal virtue 
 presented by such mothers in Israel as Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, and 
 Susanna, shed a holiness over household relationship in Israel that Avas 
 unknown elsewhere. The Talmud hardly goes too far when it ascribes to 
 the fidelity of the wives of the nation in Egypt its first deliverance and 
 its national existence, and a modern Jew is, perhaps, justified in believing 
 that the bond of family love among his people is stronger than in any 
 other race. " From the inexhaustible spring of Jewish family love," he 
 affirms, " rise the saviours of the human race." " The Jewish women 
 alone," says he justly, elsewhere, "have the sound principle to subordinate 
 all other love to that of the mother." Alexander Weill puts into the mouth 
 of the Jewish mother the words, " Dare any Jewish mother, worthy of the 
 name, let the thought of ' love ' in its ignoble sense ever cross her mind ? 
 It seems to her no better than a vile ajDostasy. A Jewess dares love only 
 God, her parents, her husband, and her children." Kompert ventures to 
 repeat the audacious Jewish saying — " God could not be everywhere, and 
 therefore He made mothers." " The mother's love," he continues, " is the 
 basis of all family life in Jewish romances ; its i^assion, its mystery. The 
 same type of the Jewish mother is foiind in all alike." It is true in all
 
 NAZAllETH, AND THE EAELY DAYS OF JESUS. 109 
 
 ages, as Douglas Jerrold puts it, tliat she who rocks the cradle rules the 
 world. The earliest years of a child are the most receptive. " It leai-ns 
 more in the first three or four thau in all its after life," saj-s Lord 
 Brougham. The character of the mother, her care, her love, her looks, 
 her soul, repeat themselves in the child while it is yet in her arms or at 
 her knees. 
 
 It is not too much, then, to ascribe supreme influence to Mary in the 
 development of her wondrous child. Wordsworth's sonnet is only the 
 adequate utterance of what must have been daily realized in the cottage of 
 Nazareth : — 
 
 " Mother ! wliose virgin bosom was uncross'd 
 With the least shade or thought to sin allied j 
 Woman ! above all women glorified ; 
 Our tainted Nature's solitary boast ; 
 Purer than foam on central ocean toss'd : 
 Brighter than Eastern skies at daybreak strewn 
 With fancied roses, thau the unblemish'd moon. 
 Before her wane begins on heav'n's blue coast ; 
 Thy image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween, 
 Not uuforgiven the suppliant knee might bend, 
 As to a visible Power, in whom did blond 
 All that was mix'd and reconciled in thee 
 Of mother's love with maiden purity. 
 Of high with low, celestial with terrene ! " 
 
 That both parents of a Jewish child took an active part in its early 
 education is shown by the instance of Susanna, of whom we are told that 
 " her parents also were righteous, and taught their daughter according 
 to the law of Moses," and by that of Timothy, who, from a child, had 
 "known the Holj'' Scriptures"; his grandmother, Lois, and his mother, 
 Eunice, having been, by implication, his teachers. But it was on the 
 father, especially, that the obligation lay to teach his children of both sexes 
 the sacred Law and the other Scriptures, the knowledge of which consti- 
 tuted almost exclusively the sum of Jewish education. Abraham had 
 found divine favour on the express ground that he " would command his 
 children and his household after him, and they should keep the waj' of 
 Jehovah"; and express injunctions required every father to teach the 
 sacred history of his nation, with the great deeds and varying fortunes of 
 his ancestors, and the words of the Law, " diligently " to his children, and 
 to talk of them while sitting in the house, or walking by the way, when 
 they retired to rest, and when they rose for the daj*. It was, in fact, 
 required by the Rabbis that a child should begin to learn the Law hy heart 
 when five years old. As soon as it could speak it had in the same way to 
 learn the lessons and petitions of the morning service. At the frequently 
 recurring household religious feasts, special rites, wh.icli should stir the 
 child to ask their meaning, formed a regular part. The book of Proverbs 
 abounds with proofs of the fidelity with which these commands were 
 carried out by both fathers and mothers. In a virtuous family no oppor- 
 tunity was lost — at the table, at home, or abroad, evening or morning— of 
 instilling reverence for God's law into the minds of the family, and of 
 teaching them its express words throughout, till they knew them by heart. 
 When \VQ remember that the festivals made labour unlawful for two
 
 110 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 months in each year, in the aggregate, it is evident that the leisure thus 
 secured would give great facilities for domestic instruction. 
 
 Such had been, for ages, the rule in Israel, and it doubtless still pre- 
 vailed in many households. Elementary schools, however, gradually came 
 to be felt a necessity for orphan children, and, in the decline of manners, 
 even for those of many living parents. Whether they had been generally 
 established in the days of Christ's childhood has, nevertheless, been 
 questioned. " If any man," says the Talmud, " deserves that his name 
 should be handed down to posterity, it is Joshua, the son of Gamaliel. 
 For, but for him, the knowledge of the Law wovild have perished in Israel. 
 In early times he who had a father was taught, but he who had not, did 
 not learn the Law. For they were commanded in the words of the Law, 
 < you'— doubtless the fathers—' shall teach them.' At a later date it was 
 ordered that schoolmasters should be appointed to teach the youth of 
 Jerusalem, because it is written, 'The law shall go forth from Zion.' But 
 this plan did not remedy the evil, for only the child that had a father was 
 sent to school, while he who had none was not sent. It was therefore 
 provided that higher teachers should be appointed in every district, and 
 that the youth of sixteen or seventeen years of age should attend their 
 schools. But this plan failed, because any scholar whom the master 
 chastised presently ran off. Then, at last, Joshua, the son of Gamaliel, 
 ordained that teachers should be appointed, as in every district, so in 
 every town, to whom the boys from the sixth or seventh year of their age 
 should be committed." But such a law must have been only supplemen- 
 tary to already existing customs, and it cannot be doubted that boys' 
 schools were already general in the time of Christ. 
 
 The enthusiasm of the Jews for education, which, in their sense of the 
 word, was the learning to read " the Law," and the committing it to 
 memory, was amazing. " A town in which there is no school must perish." 
 " Jerusalem was destroyed because the education of the children was 
 neglected," says the Talmud. Joscphus tells us that " Moses com- 
 manded that the children be taught to read, and to walk in the Avays of the 
 Law, and to know the deeds of their fathers, that they might imitate them, 
 and that they might neither transgress the Law, nor have the excuse of 
 ignorance." He re^Deatedly boasts of the universal zeal that prevailed for 
 the education of the young. " We interest ourselves more about the 
 education of our children than about anything else, and hold the obser- 
 vance of the laws, and the rules of piety they inculcate, as the weightiest 
 business of our whole lives. " If you ask a Jew any matter concerning 
 the Law, he can more readily explain it than tell his own name. Since we 
 learn it from the first beginning of intelligence, it is, as it were, graven on 
 our souls." "Our legislator neither left joractical enforcement to go on 
 without verbal instruction, nor did he permit the hearing of the Law to 
 proceed without its illustration in practice ; but beginning his laws from 
 the earliest infancy, with the appointment of every one's diet, he left no 
 act of life, of the very smallest consequence, at the pleasure and disposal 
 of the person himself." This jjassage throws light on the kind of in- 
 struction imparted. Philo, a contemporary of Christ, bears similar testi-
 
 NAZARETH, AND THE EAELY DATS OF JESUS. Ill 
 
 mony. '" Since the Jews," says he, " look on their laws as revelations from 
 God, and are taught them from their earliest childhood, they bear the image 
 of the Law on their souls. " They are taught," adds he elsewhere, "so to 
 speak, from their very swaddling clothes, by their parents, masters, and 
 teachers, in the holy laws, and in the unwritten customs, and to believe in 
 God, the one Father and Creator of the world. Josephus boasts that at 
 fourteen he had so thorough a knowledge of the Law, that the high priests 
 and first men of the town sought his opinion. There can, indeed, be no 
 question that a boy was trained, from the tenderest years, with sedulous 
 care, in a knowledge of the moral and ceremonial laws of Judaism, not 
 only as written in Scripture, but as explained, in endless detail, by the 
 " traditions " and rules of the Eabbis. At the age of thirteen he became 
 a " son of the Law," and was bound to practise all its moral and ritual 
 requirements. 
 
 The age at which children were to be sent to school is fixed in the 
 Mischna. Eaf said to Samuel, the son of Schilath, a teacher, " Do not 
 take a boy to be taught before he is six years old, but from that year 
 receive him, and train him as you do the ox, which, day by day, bears a 
 heavier load." Even the number of scholars a teacher might take is 
 rigidly fixed. " Eabba (or Eaf) has said, a schoolmaster may receive to 
 the number of twenty-five scholars. Lf there be fifty, there must be two 
 schoolmasters ; if only forty, there must be an assistant, who is to be paid 
 half by the congregation, half by the schoolmaster." The few children 
 who were not sent to school, from whatever cause, were called Am-ha- 
 aret zin, or boors— it being taken for granted that they must have lived 
 in some rude district whei'e schools were not easy of access. Neither 
 unmarried men nor women were allowed to be teachers. The Hazaia or 
 "minister" of the nearest synagogue was, in general, the master, and 
 the synagogue itself, in a great many cases, served as the schoolhouse. 
 
 In school, the children, according to their age, sat on benches, or on 
 the ground, as they still do in the East, the master sitting on a raised 
 seat. The younger children had, as text-books, some simple passage from 
 the Bible, carefully written out — for, of course, there were no books, in our 
 sense, then — and they seem to have repeated it in a sing-song cadence till 
 they learned it by heart. In Eastern schools, at this time, some of the 
 lessons are written by each scholar, with chalk, on tablets of wood, like 
 our slates in shape ; and these are cleaned after each lesson. Some cen- 
 turies after Christ, the boys, having had portions of the "LaAv" as the^r 
 class-book till they were ten years old, began at that age to read the 
 Mischna, or Eabbinical comments, and at fifteen entered on the reading of 
 the Gemara, or the collected comments on both the Law and the Jlisclina. 
 In Christ's day, advanced education was, no doubt, much the same, but it 
 must have been given by oral instruction, for the sayings of the Eabbis 
 ■were not as yet committed to writing. 
 
 The early years of Christ were, doubtless, spent in some such school, 
 after He had passed from the first lessons of Maiy, and the instructions of 
 Joseph. Mysterious as it is to us, we must never forget that, as a child. 
 He passed through the same stages as other children. The Apocryphal
 
 112 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Gospels are full of miracles attributed to these opening years, describing 
 the infant as already indefinitely beyond His age. There is no warrant 
 for this in Scripture. Nothing was out of keeping in the life of our Lord. 
 As Irenteus says, " He sanctified childhood by passing through it." Neither 
 His words nor acts, His childish pleasures nor His tears, were different 
 from those of His age. Evil alone had no growth in Him : His soul gave 
 back to the heavens all their saci'cd brightness. The ideal of humanity 
 from His birth, He never lost the innocence of childhood, but He was none 
 the less completely like other children in all things else. "We are told 
 that " the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit," that "the favour of 
 God was upon Him," and that "He kept on increasing in wisdom and 
 stature, and in favour with God and man " ; and this can only mean that, 
 with a sweet attractiveness of childish nature. He spoke, and understood 
 and thought, as simply as His playmates, in the fields, or on the hill-sides 
 of Nazareth. The earlier words are the same as are used of John the 
 Baptist in his childhood and can bear only the same meaning. Both grew 
 in the shade of a retired country life, in the sanctuary of home, apart from 
 the great world, under the eyes of God, and with His grace upon them. It 
 was only in later years that the mighty difference between them was seen, 
 when the fresh leaves of childhood, much alike in all, passed into flower. 
 There was no moment in Christ's life when the higher light began to 
 reveal itself in His soul : life and " grace " dawned together, and grew in 
 a common increase to the end. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 EARLY BOYHOOD. 
 
 r I THE religious life of the home, the Church, and the community neces- 
 -■- sarily mould, more or less, the susceptible nature of childi'en, and we 
 may be certain that " the child Jesus " was no exception, in this respect, 
 more than in others, to the general law. His opening being must have 
 reflected all that was good around Him, as the flower reflects the colours of 
 the light. 
 
 Eabbinism was then in its full glory. The strong hand of Herod the 
 Great had suppressed all political agitation for more than a generation, 
 with the result of turning the attention of the Eabbis supremely to 
 religious questions, which alone were left for their discussion. The ten 
 thousand legal definitions and decisions, which are now comprised in 
 Jewish religious jurisprudence, were for the most part elaborated in those 
 years, and every devout Israelite made it the labour of his life to observe 
 them faithfully, as far as possible. It must not, therefore, shock us, 
 accustomed as we are to feel that religious acts lose their value when not 
 free and spontaneous, to find minute prescriptions laid down and observed 
 in Judea, for every detail of public and private life and worship. The 
 whole existence of a Jew was religious, but it was a religiousness which.
 
 EARLY BOYHOOD. ' 113 
 
 while the right spirit might not be wanting, was yet claboi'atelj' mechani- 
 cal at every step. 
 
 The East is essentially different in its spirit from the West. Here, the 
 idea of improvement and advancement leads to incessant changes ; there, 
 an intense conservatism retains the past with superstitious tenacity. 
 Orientals cling, by nature, to the old, merely as such. Xovelty of any kind 
 is painful and annoying. They resist the least innovation. The customs 
 of their fathers are law ; use and wont are sacred. They are graver and 
 quieter than we. Noisy amusements have little attraction for them : they 
 seldom laugh or joke. The play of wit, dreamy thoughtfulness, atti-active 
 narrations and inventions, religious observances, and the display of re- 
 ligious festivals, are their sufficing delights. "We must guard, therefore, 
 against looking at Oriental life through Western eyes. 
 
 A devout Jew began his daily religious life with his first waking mo- 
 ments. " Every Israelite," says Maimonides, " should be penetrated at 
 all times by reverence for his Almighty Creator. The central thought of 
 the godly and devout man is — ' I have set the Lord continually before 
 me.' As if he stood before a king of flesh and blood, he should never 
 forget the requirements of right conduct and ceremonial purity." He 
 was taught that his first thoughts, as soon as he waked, should be directed 
 to the AYorship of God. Sleep was regarded as a kind of death, in which 
 the soul leaves the body, to return to it on its awaking, and hence the first 
 words of revived consciousness were an acknowledgment before "the 
 living and everlasting King, of His having given back the soul for another 
 day, in His great mercy and faithfulness." Thanks for new life thus 
 granted followed in something like this form : — " My God, the soul which 
 Thou hast given me is clean. Thou hast created it, formed it, and 
 breathed it into me, and Thou wilt take it from me, and restore it mc 
 again. While this soul lives in me, I thank Thee, Eternal One, my God, 
 and the God of my fathers ! Lord of all works ! King of all souls ! 
 Praised be Thou, O Eternal, Thou who puttest the souls again into dead 
 bodies ! " 
 
 Having risen from bed, it was not lawful to move four steps before 
 washing the hands and face, which the Rabbis taught was needed to 
 cleanse one from the defilement of sleep, as the image of death. It was 
 unlawful to touch the face, or any other part of the body, till this was 
 done, nor could it be done except in the form prescribed. Lifting the 
 ewer, after dressing, with the right hand, it must be passed into the loft, 
 and clear cold water, Eabbinically clean, must be poured thrice over the 
 right hand, the fingers of which must be open, and must point to the 
 ground. The left hand must then be washed in the same way, with water 
 poured on it from the right, and then the face must be washed three times. 
 The palms of the hands must then be joined, with the thumbs and fingers 
 outstretched, and the Avords must be uttered—" Lift up your hands to the 
 sanctuary, and praise the Lord ! " Then followed the prayer, " Blessed 
 art Thou, O Lord, our God! King of the universe! Thou who hast 
 sanctified us through Thy commandments, and hast required us to wash 
 the hands. Blessed art Thou, Eternal, our God, King of the universe! 
 
 I
 
 114 • THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 wlio hasfc formed man in -wisdom, and hast made in him many vessels. If 
 but one of these stood open, or was stopped, man conki not live and remain 
 before Thee. This is evident, and confessed before the throne of Thy 
 majesty. Blessed art Thou, O Eternal One, maintainor of all flesh, who 
 in Thy Creation doest wonders ! " 
 
 "With some such forms and words, the morning began in Joseph's house 
 in iSTazareth. But this was only the preparation for morning prayers. It 
 was not lawful to do any work, or to eat any food, till these had been 
 repeated, either at home, or more properly, in the synagogue, where they 
 formed the daily morning service. I shall describe them when I come to 
 speak of the synagogue worship. 
 
 The religiousness of the first moments of the day was" only in keeping 
 with the whole life of a devout Jew like Joseph. I have mentioned the 
 morning first because our day begins then, but that of the Jew began in the 
 evening. From the beginning of each day — that is, from the appearance 
 of the first star — to its close, and from the first day of the week till the 
 Sabbath : from the be!2;inning of each month to its feasts and half -feasts ; 
 from each New Year's Day to the next ; and from one Sabbath year — that 
 is, each seventh yeai' — till another, the attention of every Jew was fixed 
 unintermittedly on the sacred usages which returned either daily, weekly, 
 or at set times, and kept his religion continually in his mind, not only by 
 symbolical rites, but by prescribed words. There was little leisure for the 
 lighter jileasures of life, and little taste for them. Lengthened prayers in 
 set forms had to be repeated three times each day, and also at all feasts, half- 
 feasts, and fast days; each kind of day having its special prayers. In 
 every week there was a preparation day for the Sabbath, and there were 
 similar preparation days for each feast in the difilerent months; public 
 worship was held twice weekly, each Monday and Thursday, and on feast 
 days and holy days. Three pilgrimages to Jerusalem were required yearly, 
 and others were often undertaken. A whole week was occupied by "the 
 Feast of Unleavened Bread, and by that of Tabernacles and by the Feast 
 of the Dedication. Every Jew was, moreover, occupied to a large extent, 
 through his connection with the Temple, by tithes, sacrifices, and vows. 
 He visited the Holy Place as often as possible, for prayer, and to offer 
 special gifts. Ho had to pay the most minute attention, continually, to 
 permitted and forbidden food and clothing, and to the strict observance of 
 all laws resioecting the accessories of his public and private worshijo, his 
 rolls of the Law, his phylacteries, the blowing of trumpets, the gathering 
 of palm twigs at the right times, and much more. The endless rules 
 respecting tlie cleanness and uncleanness of persons and things, demanded 
 the greatest care every hour. Both men and Avomen, as such, had many 
 details to observe. Then, there were the ever-recurring iisages, festivities, 
 or events of family life— circumcisions, betrothals, marriages, divorces, 
 deaths, and mourning; the laws of the Sabbath year, recurring periodi- 
 cally, and many other diversified occurrences, which had each its prolixity 
 of religious form, not to be overlooked. Besides all, extraordinary 
 solemnities were appointed on special occasions, and these, again, made 
 grave demands on the thoughtful care of the whole population. No
 
 EAELY BOYHOOD. 115 
 
 wonder that tli3 Law v/as almost the one thing in a Jew's mind, or that a 
 child brought up in such an atmosphere should, in most cases, be blindly 
 conservative and narrow. 
 
 Opportunity will be taken hereafter to illustrate what life under the 
 Law really was, but even without the statement of details, it is evident that 
 a system which spread its close meshes over the whole of life, must have 
 been a heavy burden on the conscientious, and a fruitful source of hypocrisy 
 and dead formality to the mass. The hedge invented by Eabbinism was 
 a unique expansion of a few written precepts to infinite detail. Artificial 
 interpretations of Scripture, often contrary to the sense and even to the 
 letter of the Law, were invented as occasion required, and then enforced 
 as of more authority than the Law itself. The Rabbi could " bind and 
 loose " ; no case escaped his casuistry : religion was turned into a lifelong 
 slavery, so burdensome, that even the Talmud'itself speaks of "the vexa- 
 tious worry of the Pharisees." Ethics and theology were refined into an 
 elaborate system of jurisprudence, till even where the requirements were 
 right, their morality was poisoned in its principles, and deadened the fresh 
 pulses of spiritual life. 
 
 Still there were many in Israel who retained more or less of the primitive 
 godliness of the nation. If Eabbinism, as a system, had fallen from its 
 earlier and nobler idea of binding the nation permanently to the true 
 faith ; if it had substituted teaching for a change of heart ; legality for 
 spontaneous fidelity ; endless prescriptions for the life-giving spirit, there 
 were not a few, alike among the Rabbis and the people, to whom the ex- 
 ternal v/as not all. There may have been a Rabbi at ISTazareth as self- 
 righteous as l^echimza Ben Hakana, who, when he left his school, was 
 wont to pray—" I thank Thee, Lord, my God, that Thou hast given me 
 my portion among those who frequent the House of Instruction, and not 
 among those who are busy at the street corners, for I rise early, and they 
 rise early; I apply myself early to the Law, and they to vain things; I 
 work, and they work; I work, and receive my reward; they work and 
 receive none ; I run, and they run ; I ruir after eternal life, and they to 
 the pit." But there may have been, also, another, like the Rabbi of 
 Jamnia, who told his scholars, " I am a creature of God, and my fellow- 
 man is no less so. I have my calling in the town, he, his, in the field. I 
 go early to my work, and he to his. As ho is not made proud )jy his 
 labour, I am not made proud by mine. If you think that I am busied with 
 great matters and he with small, rememlDcr that true woi'k, whether great 
 or small, leads to the same end." 
 
 The child Jesus must have often heard in the house of such a man as 
 Joseph, and in those of his neighbours of like mind with him, whom he 
 visited, a healthy intelligent religiousness, beautiful in any age. The 
 popular proverbs and sayings Avhich have come down to us may easily 
 bring back many an evening scene in Nazareth, when friends or neighbours 
 of Joseph's circle met for an hour's quiet gossip, when their day's toil was 
 over. " Quite true, neighbour," we may fancy one of such a group saying, 
 "he who knows the Law, and has no fear of God, is like the ruler of the 
 synagogue who has only the key of the inner door, but not of the outer."
 
 116 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 "Yes, Zechariali, a God-fearing Rabbi is lilce a good player who has his 
 harp with him, but a godless Rabbi is like one who has nothing on which 
 to make music." "You speak truly, Mcuahcm; a godly man is the glory 
 of a town, its reward, and its ornament ; if he leave it, its glory, its re- 
 ward, and its ornament, leave it with him." " My father used to tell 
 me," chimes in Hananyah Ben Hizkiyah, " that there are four who never 
 have the face of God lifted vipon them— the scoffer, the liar, the hypocrite, 
 and the slanderer." " Rabbi Nathan," says the fifth, " is right, I think ; 
 I have heard him say that the man who stands firm in temptation, and 
 the hour of whose death is like that of his birth, is the only man to be 
 envied." 
 
 Good counsels to the young were not wanting. The Hazaii who taught 
 the Nazareth school in the synagogue, may have told liis scholars — " Get 
 close to the seller of perfumes if you want to be fragrant." He may 
 have given the groups of little ones at his feet words of wisdom such as 
 these— that " grapes on vines are beautiful, and in their right place; but 
 grapes among thorns arc neither." " A Nazarite should go round about, 
 rather than corns near a vineyard." " A friend who, as often as he 
 meets you, tells you, in secret, your faults, is better than one who, when- 
 ever he meets you, gives you a gold yy'iece." " If you see an humble 
 man, you may almost take for granted that he fears God, but a proud 
 man is no better than an idolater." " Make the best of your childhood ; 
 youth is a crown of roses ; old age of thorns. Yet do not fear death ; it is 
 only a kiss, if you fear God." " Truth is the seal of God." " Trust in 
 the mercy of God, even if the sharp sword be at your throat ; He forsakes 
 none of His creatures to give them up to destruction." " Take a lesson 
 from Jose Ben Joezer, who was the first Jew ever crucified. He died for 
 his faith in the evil time of the Syrian kings. As he was being led to 
 death, his sister's son, Alkim, tried to make him believe that God showed 
 more favour to transgressors of the Law than to the godly. He could 
 have saved Jose's life, if the martyr had yielded to him. But Jose only 
 answered, ' If God prepares such a fate as mine for the godly, what will 
 become of the wicked ? '—and passed on to the cross." " The humble 
 man is he who is as reverent before God as if he saw Him with his eyes.'' 
 
 A wise teacher may have spoken thus to the children in the school, but 
 wise counsels would not be wanting at home. Like all Orientals, Joseph 
 was, doubtless, given to speak in proverbs and parables. " One sheep 
 follows another," he might have said. "As is the mother, so is the 
 daughter." "A man without friends is like the left hand without the 
 right." "The road has ears, and so has the wall." "It is no matter 
 whether a man have much or little, if his heart be set on heaven." "A 
 good life is better than high birth." " The bread and the rod came from 
 heaven together." " Seeking wisdom when you are old is like writinf 
 on water; seeking it when you are young is like graving on stone." 
 " Every word you speak, good or bad, light or serious, is "written in a 
 book." "Fire cannot keep company with flax without kindling it." 
 " In this world a man follows his own will ; in the next comes the .judg- 
 ment." " With the same measure with Avhich a man measures to others
 
 EARLY BOYHOOD. 117 
 
 it ■will be measurecl to liim again." " Patience, and silence in sti'ife, are 
 the sign of a noble niiud." " lie who makes the pleasures of this world 
 his portion, loses those of the world to come ; but he who seeks those of 
 heaven, receives, also, those of earth." " He who humbles himself will 
 be exalted by God; but he who exalts himself, him will God humble." 
 '"Whatever God docs is right." "Speech is silver; silence is worth 
 twice as much." " Sin hardens the heart of man." " It is a shame for 
 a plant to speak ill of him who planted it." " Two bits of dry wood set 
 a moist one on fire." All these are Jewish sayings, which Jesus may 
 well have heard in His childhood. 
 
 Nazareth Avould, no doubt, have its finer sjiirits who, from time to time 
 shed the light of their higher nature over family gatherings, and none of 
 this could be lost on such a child as Jesus. On some glorious night, when 
 the moon was walking in brightness, a mind like this may have told the 
 children round him some such fine Hebrew apologue as follows : — 
 
 "The Eternal sent forth His creating voice, saying, 'Let two lights 
 shine in the firmament, as kings of the earth, and dividers of the revolving 
 year.' 
 
 "He spake, and it was done. The sun rose as the first Light. As a 
 bridegroom comes forth in the morning from his chaniber; as a hero 
 rejoices on his triumphal march, so rose he, clothed in the splendour of 
 God. A crown of all hues encircled his head; the earth i-ejoiced, the 
 plants sent up their odours to him, and the flowers put on their best 
 array. 
 
 " The other Light looked on with envy, as it saw that it could not 
 outvie the Glorious One in splendour. ' What need is there,' it asked, 
 murmuring to itself, 'of two kings on one throne ? Why was I the second 
 instead of the first ? ' 
 
 " Forthwith its brightness faded, chased away by its inward chagrin. 
 It flew from it high through the air, and became the Host of Stars. 
 
 " The Moon stood pale as the dead, ashamed before all the heavenly 
 ones, and wept — ' Have pity on me. Father of all creatures, have ])ity.' 
 
 " Then the angel of God stood before the Sad One, and told her the 
 decree of the Highest. ' Because thou hast envied the light of the Sun, 
 unhappy one, henceforth thou Avilt only shine by his light, and when 
 yonder earth comes between thee and him thou wilt stand darkened, in 
 part, or entirely, as now. 
 
 " ' Yet, Child of Error, weep not. The Merciful One has forgiven thy 
 sin, and turned it to good for thee. " Go," said He, " speak comfortably 
 to tlie Sorrowful One ; she will be, at least, a queen, in her brightness. 
 The tears of her sorrow will be a balm to quicken all living things, and 
 renew the strength which the beams of the Sun have made faint." ' 
 
 "The Moon went away comforted, and, lo, there streamed round her 
 that briglitness in which she still shines : she set forth on that peaceful 
 path in which she still moves, as Queen of the Night and leader of the 
 stars. Lamenting her sin, and pitying the tears of men, she seeks whom 
 she can revive, and looks for any one she can cheer." 
 
 Such, no doubt, would be some of the characteristics of Nazareth life.
 
 118 THE LIFE OP CHEIST. 
 
 Every oue would know every oue ; industry and idleness ; worth and 
 vice; pleasure and sadness; would be around the growing Child. The 
 oxen ploughing the little valley below the town and the great plain 
 outside, would often arrest His eyes ; the asses and mules, and camels 
 laden with goods or produce, would pass then, as now, np the raountain 
 track to the narroAV Nazareth streets : the different trades of the village 
 would be busy, as they are still. The wise and the simple : the clown and 
 the scholar : the poor and the rich : the soiled workman and the proud 
 squire : helpless infancy, and as helpless age ; the school, the playground, 
 the market, the court, the synagogue, and the cemetery, would each in 
 turn be prominent for the time. But it would be under Joseph's roof, as 
 in a silken nest, with the counsels of Joseph, and the gentle and lofty 
 devoutncss of Maiy, that the young soul, destined one day to be so great, 
 would learn its richest lessons of childhood. 
 
 At a very early age, Jesus would be taken to the synagogue with 
 Joseph and Mary, and the other children of the ISI'azareth family circle, 
 for even then that institution had become the banner of Jewish nationality, 
 the centre of national life, and the regis of the Jewish faith, whose 
 services no Israelite would thhik of neglecting. 
 
 The importance of the Synagogue dates not later than the age of the 
 Maccabees. It rose from the institution, by Ezra, of periodical readings 
 of the Law in public. Its eaidiest history is not known, for we can hardly 
 trust the Rabbinical traditions, that there were hundreds in Jerusalem 
 under the second Temple. But the germ of the Synagogue doubtless 
 existed in Babylon. The exiles could no longer offer their sacrifices, for 
 this could be done only in the Temple at Jerusalem. Hence they naturally 
 betook themselves to prayer, and lifted their hands, in their loneliness, to 
 God, at the times when their sacrifices were wont to be consumed. Instead 
 of these they presented their prayers, and prophets like Ezekiel, on the 
 Sabbath, spoke to them of their duty. It would seem as if the Law itself 
 had been well-nigh unknown during the exile, from the fact of Ezra 
 summoning the people to hear it, as something which they had trans- 
 gressed, from ignorance of its requirements. To him, apparently, belongs 
 the signal honour of introducing the custom of constant public reading of 
 the sacred books before the congregations of the people, and of taking care 
 that, as Hebrew was no longer understood, interpreters should be provided, 
 to translate the Scripture lessons, at the public services, into the spoken 
 dialect. Established, first, in Jerusalem, synagogues soon spread over 
 the land, and even beyond it, wherever Jews had settled, till they 
 gradually became the great characteristic of the nation. For, thoucrh 
 the services of the Temple were yet cherished, the Synagogue, by its 
 local convenience, its supreme influence in fixing Jewish religious opinion, 
 and its natural importance as the centre of each community, and the basis 
 of their social life, carried with it the seeds of the destruction of the 
 strictly local Temple service. The priest, henceforth, was of less import- 
 ance than the lay Babbi, for while the one touched life at only a few 
 points, the other directed its every movement. In Christ's day there 
 were synagogues everywhere. In Jerusalem, alone, there gradually rose.
 
 EARLY BOYHOOD. ' 119 
 
 according to tlie Talmud, no fewer than 480. Tiberias had thirteen, 
 Damascus ten, and other cities and towns, in proportion to their popula- 
 tion. But the Mother Synagogue in the Temple still remained, as it were, 
 the model after which all other synagogues were organized. 
 
 Whei'ever ten Jews were settled, it was incumbent on them to forn? 
 themselves into a congregation, and have synagogue service Where tlr 
 Jewish population was small, open structures on the banks of rivers, or ot 
 the seashore were preferred, from their convenience for the necessary 
 purifications ; but, whenever it was possible, a synagogue was erected by 
 the free contributions of the people. Sometimes, indeed, a rich man 
 built one at his own expense. The ruins of tliose in Galilee, Christ's own 
 country, enable us to learn many particulars respecting this locality at 
 least. In selecting sites, the builders by no means always chose prominent 
 jDositions. If, in some cases, the Rabbinical requirements were observed 
 that the synagogue should be raised on the highest part of the town, and 
 its entrance be on the western side, they were, seemingly, more frequently 
 neglected. The ruins of the old synagogues in the district on the Sea of 
 Galilee, and north of it, are sometimes in the lower part of the town, and 
 at others have had a site excavated for them in the rocky side of a hill. 
 Their entrances are almost always at the southern end, an arrangement 
 hardly to have been expected, as it required every Jew, on entering, to 
 turn his back to Jerusalem. 
 
 The building was always rectangular, with its longest dimension in a 
 nearly south and north direction, and its interior divided into five aisles, 
 by four rows of columns, unless it was very small, when two rows of 
 columns were used, making only three aisles. The walls were well and 
 solidly built of native limestone : the stones " chiselled " into each other, 
 without mortar, and, while finely dressed outside, left rough on the inner 
 side, for plastering. The entrances were three in number ; one large 
 doorway, opening into the central aisle, and a smaller one on each side, 
 though sometimes, in small synagogues, there was only one entrance. 
 Folding doors, with socket hinges, closed by bars on the inside, gave them 
 security. Over the doors was more ornament than Ave might have ex- 
 pected — sculptures of the golden candlestick — or of the pot of manna — or 
 of the paschal lamb — or the vine. The fioors were paved with slabs of 
 white limestone, and the arrangement of the columns was the same in all. 
 The spaces between these were very small, though the columns themselves 
 were sometimes elaborately finished with Corinthian and Ionic capitals. 
 Blocks of stone laid from column to column received the wooden rafters, 
 which were bedded deeply in these supports, for strength, and were very 
 broad as well as thick, to bear up a flat roof, covered heavily with earth, 
 which was the fashion in private houses also, as it still is in nearly all 
 Arab dwellings, as best adapted for keeping out the intense heat of the 
 sun. The ruins are too imperfect to show the arrangement of tho 
 windows. 
 
 The synagogues wei'e open every day for three services ; but as those 
 of the afternoon and evening were always "joined, there were, in reality, 
 only two. It was the duty of every godly Jew to go to each service, for
 
 120 ■ THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 so sacred was daily attendance, that the Eahbis taught that "he who 
 practised it saved Israel from the heathen." The two market days, 
 Monday and Thursday, when the country people came into town, and when 
 the courts were held, and the Sabbaths, were the special times of public 
 worshi]5. Feast days, and fasts, were also marked by similar sacredness. 
 
 The interior of the synagogues was arranged, as far as possible, after 
 the model of the Tabernacle or the Temple. Before the doors of some, a 
 sunken space for a porch formed a counterpart to the forecourt of the 
 sanctuary. The space immediately inside was for the congregation. A 
 little beyond the middle, a raised and enclosed platform, in the centre of 
 the floor, in some measure corresponded to the altar. Here the official 
 stood to conduct the services, by reading from the sacred books and 
 chanting the prayers. In the wall at the farther end was a recess, before 
 which hung a veil ; the recess the equivalent of the Holy of Holies ; the 
 veil, of the one before that mysterious chamber in the Temple. In this 
 niche were kept the Sacred Rolls, wrapped in several covers of linen and 
 silk ; the outer one adorned, as means allowed, with gold and silver. The 
 Rabbis required that the shrine should look towards Jerusalem, but this 
 was not generally provided for in the Galilean synagogues of Christ's day. 
 Before it always hung an ever-burning lamp — the I'epresentative of the 
 "eternal fire" in the holy place in the Temple, and at its side stood a 
 large eight -branched lamp, like the " golden candlestick " of the Temjjle, 
 which is sculptured on the Arch of Titus. It was adorned with inscrip- 
 tions, and was kept for the illumination made at the Feast of the 
 Dedication, each December, when the joy of the nation at the rekindling 
 of the lamps in the Temple, after the triumph of Judas Maccabaeus, was 
 celebrated for eight days together. Other lamps hung up and down the 
 synagogue to illuminate it during the Sabbath evening service, whether 
 needed or not, in honour of the day, as was done also in private houses. 
 Rabbis and the elders of the synagogue sat on raised cushions in the 
 " chief seats," next the shrine, facing the people. The men of the congre- 
 gation filled the open floor next these, and in small synagogues, the women, 
 separated by a lattice, sat with their backs to the men. Where space 
 allowed, however, a flat gallery was built for them, but, in any case, they 
 were not visible to the other sex. Trumpets for proclaiming the new 
 moon, and for publishing sentences of excommunication, formed part of 
 the furniture, but were kept in the house of the Hazan. In the porch was 
 a tablet with prayers for the reigning prince, and another with the names 
 of any who had been excommunicated, while below them were boxes to 
 receive the alms of the congregation, as they entered, for the poor. 
 
 The greatest reverence was paid by every Jew to his synagogue. It 
 could not be built near a public bath, or a wash-house, or a tannery, and, 
 if it were taken down, no one would on any account cross the ground on 
 which it had stood. 
 
 The chief authorities of the Synagogue were a council of elders, of 
 whom one acted as head, though only the first among equals. They 
 pronounced excommunications, delivered sentences on offenders of various 
 kinds, managed the charities of the congregation, and attended to the
 
 EARLY BOYHOOD. 121 
 
 wants of strangei's, forming a local counterpart of the " oklers of the 
 people," who, through the whole history of Israel, formed a kind of 
 national senate, — and of those humbler "elders" who constituted the 
 ruling body over towns and districts, as their predecessoi's had done over 
 the different tribes. It marks the simple and healthy basis of society 
 in Israel, that the one idea of the family and household, ruled by its head, 
 thus lay at its root, as is indeed implied in the very name — House of 
 Israel— by which the nation, as a Avhole, was known. The head ruler or 
 elder of the Synagogue was formally consecrated by the laying on of 
 hands. 
 
 The inferior offices were held by various officials. The Hazan, or 
 "minister," had the charge of the building, of cleaning the lamps, 
 opening and closing the doors, and doing any other necessary servile work, 
 like a modern sexton ; besides acting as messenger to the rulers. But 
 he, also, in many cases, led the prayers and chants. It was his part to 
 hand the roll of the Law to the Eeader for the time, pointing out the 
 proper lesson of the day. The Eeader, as representative of the congrega- 
 tion, had to blow the trumpet at the new moon, and to strew ashes on his 
 head on fast days. The alms of the congregation were collected and 
 distributed by special officers, of Avhom two were required to act together 
 in the receiving : three in the distribution. There seems to have been 
 no functionary for reading the prayers, which was done iu the name of 
 the congregation, and by its authority, by any one empowered for the 
 time. Any memljer of the congregation, unless he were a minor, was 
 qualified to do so. As a rule, however, it is likely that the Hazan generally 
 led the chanting, and read the ordinary lessons. A curious feature in the 
 organization was, that in each synagogue, ten men, known as Batlanim, 
 were paid to attend every service fi'om its opening to its close, that there 
 might never be fewer present than the Rabbis required to constitute a 
 lawful service. 
 
 There seems to have been only one synagogue in Nazareth, so that, as 
 all the Jews in the town doubtless attended it, a large proportion of the 
 population must have been other than Israelites, or the town itself must 
 have been small, to judge from the size of other synagogues of Galilee, 
 whose ruins have been discovered. The congregation would, in many 
 respects, be very different from Western notions. The men came in the 
 long, flowing, and, to us, feminine-looking dress of the East; their heads 
 covered with turbans of various colours — some simple, others costly— or 
 with the plain kcfij^eh, a kerchief of cotton, linen, or silk, of various 
 colours, folded so that three of the corners hung over the back and shoul- 
 ders, leaving the face exposed, and loosely held round the head by a cord 
 — as is still the Arab custom ; their clothing, only a long white or striped 
 tunic, of linen or cotton, with sleeves, next the body — bound at the loins 
 by a sash or girdle, — and a loose abba or cloak thrown over it ; their bare 
 feet shod with sandals. Over the abba some would wear a wide scarf of 
 white wool, thin and light; with bars of red, purple and blue; but with 
 many, this scarf, enlarged to an abba, would be the only outer garment. 
 A few rich men^ might, perhaps, wear one of silk, adorned with silver or
 
 122 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 gold. This %yas the Tallith, an indispensable part of the clothing of a 
 Jew. From its four corners hung four tassels of eight threads a-piece, 
 of hyacinth blue, of wool alone, woven and made up with superstitious 
 care, as a half religious art, by a Jew only. These were the Zizitli, or 
 fringes, woi-n in fulfilment of an express commandment of Moses, that the 
 sight of them might make the wearer " remember all the commandments 
 of the Lord, and do them." So sacred, indeed, were they, that a smaller 
 Tallith, as well, duly provided with them, was worn underneath his 
 clothing by every Jew, from his earliest years, and he had been taught, 
 even in childhood, never to put it on without repeating the prayer— 
 " Blessed art Thou, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who hast sanc- 
 tified us with Thy commandments, and given us the commandment of the 
 fringes." The outer Tallith, indeed, was only worn because tlie fringes of 
 this one vrere covered up, and could not be kissed, as the Eabbis required, 
 from time to time, during one of the synagogue prayers. The right use 
 of the lessons of the fringes a Jew believed equivalent to keeping the 
 whole Law, for the Eabbis told him that, as the letters of the name Zizith, 
 used as figures, made up the number 600, they and the five knots and 
 eight threads are equal to the whole 613 precepts of the Law. 
 
 The Jewish mothers and daughters of IsTazareth, as they made their 
 way to the synagogue, were not less Oriental and strange. They were 
 always veiled in white at public worship, and not unfrequently at other 
 times. Their flowing mantles showed as great variety of colour as female 
 dress does now, but they were much the same in shape as they had been 
 for centuries. Like many of the men, they wore turbans, but they showed 
 a contrast to the other sex in their ornaments. On week days they wore 
 nose rings, but they were not allowed to wear these on the Sabbath, 
 though they indulged in earrings, and metal armlets, and necklaces and 
 leg rings, which tinkled as their Avearers walked. Their feet, like those of 
 the men, were shod with sandals. The males of a family might go to the 
 synagogue any way they chose, but the women Avent only by back streets, 
 to avoid the gaze of men. All, alike, were required to greet no one, and to 
 make no reverence, whoever passed, nor to loiter by the way, lest it 
 should distract their minds from thinking upon God. At the threshold all 
 laid aside their sandals, for it was unbecoming to enter even one's oath 
 house with shod feet, far less the house of God ; but, for the same reason, 
 all kept their heads covered during the whole service. Every man, on 
 entering, prepared to put on his Tephillin or phylacteries, which must be 
 worn every day during morning prayer. They consisted of two small 
 parchment boxes, about an inch square, one divided into four parchment 
 compartments, the other left undivided. On the two sides was stamped 
 the letter U), as part of the word Shaddai — one of tlie names of the 
 Almighti^ Four slips of parchment, each about an inch wide and eight 
 inches long, inscribed with the verses— Deut. vi. 4-9; Dent. ix. 13-21; 
 Exod. xiii. 2-10 ; and Exod. xiii. 11-16, were placed in the different com- 
 partments of the first, a parchment lid enclosing the whole, with long 
 leather thongs attached, to bind it on the forehead. The second box was 
 exactly the same, except that its interior was not divided, and the verses
 
 EARLY BOYHOOD. 123 
 
 of Scripture enclosed were written, in four columns, on one piece of parch- 
 ment. 
 
 The former of these phylacteries, or amulets, was bound on the forehead, 
 exactly between the eyes, before morning prayer began ; the other on the 
 left arm, opposite the heart, its thongs being wound seven times round the 
 arm and thrice round the middle finger. Their wearer was now i-eady to 
 take part in the services. As in the case of the Tallith, the Tephillin were 
 put on with words of prayer in the prevailing language of the country. 
 
 The worship of the synagogue was limited to prayer and reading the 
 Law and the Prophets, for though a Eabbi or other person, if present, 
 might be asked to speak, this was an addition to the prescribed forms. 
 The service began with silent prayer by all present, the congregation 
 standing during this as during all the prayers. Then the Eeader, wearing 
 his Tallith, having entered the raised enclosure in the middle of the syna- 
 gogue, recited a prayer of adoration from the desk — " Blessed be Thou by 
 whose word the world was created ; blessed be Thou for ever ! Blessed be 
 Thou who hast made all out of nothing ; blessed be He who orders and con- 
 firms; blessed be He who has pity on the earth; blessed be He who has pity 
 on His creatures ; blessed be He who richly rewards His saints ; blessed be 
 He who lives for ever, and is for ever the same ; blessed be He, the Saviour 
 and Eedeemer ! Blessed be Thy name ! Blessed be Thou, Eternal I 
 Our God ! King of the universe ! All-Merciful God and Father ! Thy 
 people utter Thy praise with their lips : Thy godly servants proclaim Thy 
 glory and honour. We would praise Thee, Eternal Lord God, with the 
 psalms of Thy servant David; we would laud and magnify Thee with 
 songs of thanksgiving and praise. We do homage to Thy name, our King, 
 our God, the only One, He who liveth for ever, Lord, whose name is 
 glorious for ever and ever ! Blessed be Thou, O Eternal ! Lord, blessed 
 be Thou in songs of praise ! " To this, as to all prayers, the congregation 
 answered. Amen. 
 
 Eeadiiigs from difi:erent parts of the Scripture then followed, in part a 
 collection of separate verses, in part connected extracts, ending with the 
 last six Psalms, this introductory portion of the service closing with 
 another short but exalted prayer. A few verses more from Scripture 
 followed, and then came the Song of Moses at the Passage of the Eed 
 Sea, and another short prayer. 
 
 Presently the Eeader summoned the congregation to join in a short 
 responsive utterance of praise known as the Kadish. " Praise the Lord," 
 said he, " who is worthy to be praised," and to this the people, bowing 
 responded, "Praised be the Lord, who is ever and eternally worthy of 
 praise ! " and so, through several antiphonies. 
 
 It was obligatory on every Jew to repeat certain verses twice every 
 day, morning and evening. These were now read. They were known by 
 the name of Sch'ma, or " Hear," from their beginning with the words, 
 " Hear, Israel, the Eternal, our God, is one Eternal God." Two prayers 
 preceded them ; the one, heard with joy and yet with trembling, exalting 
 God for His Majesty in the heavens, amidst the armies of the angels. It 
 was believed to he listened to by all heaven, God Himself and the angels
 
 121 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 responding, at its close — " Happy the people in such a ca.^e ; happy the 
 people whose God is Jehovah ! " The othei" thanked God for His love to 
 Israel, and asked enlightenment in His holy law. Another short prayer 
 was now read, thanking Him for the mighty works He had done for their 
 fathers, especially in delivering them from Egypt, and ending with suppli- 
 cation for delivery as a nation from their evil state. The closing words 
 chanted by the Reader were striking^"Rock of Israel! up ! to the help of 
 Israel : save, for Thy promise sake, Judah and Israel ! Save us, Eternal 
 God, eternal God of Hosts ! whose name is the Holy One of Israel. 
 Blessed be Thou, O Eternal, who of old didst redeem Israel ! " 
 
 During all these prayers the congregation stood, with their faces 
 towards the shrine of the Law. Only the Reader spoke : the congregation 
 simply responded " Amen," except at the Kadish. 
 
 Now commenced the second part of the service— the repeating of the 
 " prayers known as the eighteen Benedictions," or simply as " The 
 Prayer." It was originally drawn up by the men of the Great Syna- 
 gogue, but finally arranged in its present form, with one or two addi- 
 tional prayers, about the year 100 after Christ. The whole were spoken 
 by the entire congregation softly, and then aloud by the Reader, and this 
 was repeated at the evening service, it being required of every Israelite 
 that he should repeat them all, for himself, three times every day, just as 
 he Avas required to repeat the Sch'ma twice daily. During this series of 
 prayers the whole congregation stood, immovable, with their faces towards 
 the shrine, and their feet close together, in an attitude of fixed devotion. 
 At the besfinning and close of the first and sixteenth Benedictions all Ijent 
 the knee, and bowed their heads to the earth. As in the case of the 
 Sch'ma, these prayers were read without the change or addition of a word. 
 After the congregation had recited them the Reader, still standing in the 
 raised enclosure, took three steps backwards, then three forwards : stood 
 quite still, and commenced, " Lord, open Thou our lips, that our mouth 
 may show forth Thy praise ! " "I will call upon the name of the Lord ; 
 ascribe ye greatness unto our God!" The first three prayers of the 
 eighteen contained ascriptions of praise, the last three, thanksgivings, and 
 the twelve between, supplications for the nation and for individuals. As 
 the Reader closed, he recited the words — " We, here below, would hallow 
 Thy name, as it is hallowed in heaven, as is written in the prophets — 
 
 " One cried to another, and said .' " The congregation then responded 
 
 " Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts : the whole earth is full of His 
 glory ! " Then the Reader began again : " They who stand before Him 
 say, ' Blessed ; ' " and the congregation answered, " Blessed be the glory of 
 the Lord from His place." The Reader, once more, began : " In Thy holy 
 Scripture it is written : " and the congregation answered, " The Lord shall 
 reign for ever, even Thy God, Zion, unto all generations. Hallelujah ! " 
 
 On Mondays and Thursdays, and on Sabbaths, the Law was now read. 
 For the Sabbaths, the five Books of Moses were divided into fifty sections, 
 of seven lessons each, and a complete section was repeated each Sabbath, 
 so that the Law was read through in a year. At the end of each lesson, 
 and at its beginning, a collect was road, and between each, the Expositor
 
 EARLY LOYIIOOD. 125 
 
 —a. member of the congregation who had been invited for the purpose, 
 and who stood in tlie desk beside the Reader while the lesson was being 
 read — delivered a short address from it. A priest, if present, had the first 
 invitation, then a Levite ; any one who seemed to know the Law coming 
 after. The roll of the Prophets was handed to him by the Reader after 
 the closing collect of the lesson. At each service there was thus a series 
 of short comments. One Expositor gave a general address on the Law 
 embodied in the lesson : another, an exhortation based on it, and a third 
 expounded the allegorical mysteries it shadowed forth. Each, however, 
 was expected to illustrate the three cardinal points of Jewish piety — the 
 love of God, of virtue, and of one's neighbour, this last duty being addi- 
 tionally enforced by a collection in the boxes at the door, " for the land of 
 Israel.'" 
 
 Very few relics of these synagogue addresses survive, but we are able 
 even from these, as preserved in the Talmud, to realize their general 
 characteristics. Short, and in great measure made up of proverbs, natural 
 imagery, and parables, they were very different from our sermons. One 
 example will suffice. An ancient address from the same chapter of Isaiah 
 from which Jesus took His text in the synagogue of Nazareth, runs thus 
 — the special words commented on being, " He hath clothed me with the 
 garments of salvation" : — 
 
 " There are seven garments," says the speaker, " which the Holy One, 
 blessed be His name, has put on since the world began, or will put on before 
 the hour when He will visit with His wrath the crodless Edom. When He 
 created the world He clothed Himself in honour and glory, for it says : 
 ' Thou art clothed witli honour and glory.' When He showed Himself at 
 the Rod Sea He clothed Himself in majesty, for it says : ' TJie Lord 
 reigneth, He is clothed with majesty.' "When He gave the Law He clothed 
 Himself with might, for it says : ' Jehovah is clothed with might, where- 
 with He hath girded Himself.' As often as He forgave Israel its sins He 
 clothed Himself in white, for it says : ' His garment was white as snow.' 
 When He punishes the nations of the world He puts on the garments of 
 vengeance, for it says : ' He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, 
 and was clad with zeal as a cloak.' He will put on the sixth robe when the 
 Messiah is revealed. Then will He clothe Himself in righteousness, for it, 
 says : ' For He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salva- 
 tion on His head.' He will put on the seventh robe when He punishes Edom. 
 Then will He clothe Himself in Adom (red), for it says : ' Wherefore art 
 Thou red in Thine apparel ? ' But the robes with which He will clothe the 
 Messiah will shine from one end of the world to the other, for it says : 
 ' As a bridegroom who is crowned with his turljan, like a priest.' And the 
 sons of Israel will rejoice in His light, and will say, ' Blessed be the hour 
 when the Messiah was born, blessed the womb which bore Him, blessed the 
 eyes that were counted worthy to see Him. For the opening of His lips 
 is blessing and peace. His siieech is rest to the soul, the thouglits of His 
 heart confidence and joy, the speech of His lips pardon and forgiveness, 
 His prayer like the sweet-smelling savour of a sacrifice, His supplications 
 holiness and purity.' how blessed is Israel for whom such a hjt is rcscr-
 
 126 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 vcd, for it says : ' How great is Thy goodness which Thou hasfc laid np 
 for them that fear Thee,' " 
 
 On Mondays and Thursdays the first of the seven lessons for the next 
 Sunday was read, but it was divided into three portions, before each of 
 which one of the congregation was called up to the desk. 
 
 A few prayers more from the Reader, and the service was ended, with a 
 parting benediction delivered by a priest Avith uplifted hands, if one were 
 present ; if not, by the Reader. The prayers were repeated in the common 
 dialect of Palestine as a rule, but in Greek towns, such as Cassarea, they 
 were also recited in Greek. The Hebrew or Chaldee of the Law or the 
 Prophets was translated into the spoken language by an interpreter, who 
 stood by the side of the Reader. 
 
 Such was the morning service. In the afternoon the congregation met 
 once more ; heard a shorter service, and frequently remained, listening to 
 addresses, till lamplight in the evening. The "Amen" of the congrega- 
 tion, from time to time, was the only interruption sanctioned, but among 
 Orientals it would have been hopeless to enforce silence. Ever and anon 
 a hearer volunteered assistance if the speaker hesitated, or corrected a 
 mistake if he supposed one made, and the whole congregation, at times, 
 signified aloud their agreement, shouted a contradiction, or even ordered 
 the speaker to be silent. 
 
 When to the many prayers of the synagogue service we add those re- 
 quired in private life, the " vain repetitions" against which Christ cautioned 
 His hearers on the Mount may bo understood. Besides the five daily 
 repetitions of the Sch'ma and the Benedictions, every Jew gave thanks 
 before and after every act of eating or drinking ; before, and, often, after, 
 each of the countless external rites and exercises required of him ; and 
 there were, besides, sjoecial prayers for new moons, new years, feasts, half- 
 feasts, and fasts, and many for special incidents of private or family life. 
 Prayer, always prescribed in exact words, was in fact multiplied till it was 
 in danger of becoming too often formal and mechanical — a mere outward 
 act, of superstitious importance in itself, apart from the spirit in which it 
 was offered. 
 
 Such a circle of synagogue service, constantly repeated, we must conceive 
 the child Jesus to have frequented from his earliest years, day by day, and 
 week by week. 
 
 The influence of an institution in wliich the Law was read, throughout, 
 every year, on the Sabbath, and, in part, twice each week, with extra read- 
 ings on special high days ; in v/hich the Prophets and Psalms were con- 
 stantly brought before the congregation, and in which multiplied prayers, 
 always the same, impressed on the mind every emotion and thought of the 
 national religion, in language often grand and solemn in the extreme, 
 must have been great. The synagogue was, in fact, the seed-bed of Jud- 
 aism : its inspiring soul and its abiding nurture. It was in it that Jesus, 
 as a child, was first drawn into love and sympathy for His people, and that 
 He heard the rights, duties, and prospects, of the suffering people of God, 
 and drank in that deep knowledge of the Law and the Prophets, by which, 
 as St. Luke tells us, " He kept on growing in wisdom." The lessons He
 
 SOCIAL INFLUENCEb;. 127 
 
 learned in it can be traced througli the whole Gospels. The adircs^es He 
 heard were no doubt, for the most part, lifeless Rabbinical refinements, 
 with a Pharisaic colouring, which His pure and sinless soul, filled with the 
 love of His heavenly Father, instinctively prized at their true value. His 
 words in after life often show that He had been accustomed to see Phari- 
 sees and Scribes in the synagogue, who made the Mondays and Thursdays, 
 on which, service was held, their days of fasting ; who paraded a show of 
 long prcayers or of liberal alms; and eagei'ly pressed forward to the front 
 seats, where they would be most in honour, and would be most likely to be 
 called up to speak. As He grew older He would meet, in turn, in the 
 synagogue, every shade of the religion of the day, — the strictness of the 
 school of Shamiuai, and the mildness of that of Hillel ; Jewish bigotry, and 
 Galilasan freedom and tolerance ; the latitndinarianism of the Sadducee, or 
 the puritanical strictness of the Essene. The great doctrines of ceremonial 
 purity, 01 the righteousness of works, of the kingdom of God, and of the 
 coming redemption of Israel, would sound in His ears Sabbath by Sabbath, 
 giving Him much to retain and still more to i-eject. In the synagogue He 
 came in contact with the religious life of His race, in its manifold aspects. 
 We see, in His public life, how the crowds that gathered round Him, as the 
 new Rabbi of Israel, entered into conversation with Him on the subjects 
 of His discourse, or commented on them afterwards, and He had, no doubt, 
 done much the same with the teachers He heard in His earlier years. 
 The Rabbis whom He met in the synagogues, in the markets, or at meals, 
 were accustomed to exchange question and answer with all, and must 
 often have had to reply to His searching questions, and deep ijisight into 
 Scripture. ISTor would the longing of the people at large, for the ven- 
 geance of God on the oppressors of the nation, escape His notice. As a 
 man in all things like other men, except in His siolessness — the syna- 
 gogue with its services, and the free expression of thought, both in public 
 and private, which it favoured, must have been one of the chief agencies in 
 developing His human nature. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 SOCIAL INFLTJENCES. 
 
 AMONG the influences amidst v/hich the child Jesus grew up at 
 ISTazaretli, the Synagogue, with its constantly recurring services, 
 was, no doubt, one of the most important. It was a characteristic of 
 Jewish life, however, that its religion was interwoven with the whole 
 tissue of daily events, from the cradle to the grave. 
 
 The Jewish ecclesiastical calendar, with its cycle of feasts, half-feasts, 
 and fasts, must have had a great effect in colouring the general mind, and 
 perpetuating the system and sentiments which they illustrated. There 
 were four different reckonings of the Hebrew year — that which commenced 
 with the first day of Kisan, and was known as " the year of kings and 
 feasts ; " a second, which dated from the first of Elul— that is, from the
 
 128 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 full moon of August — from wliicli the yeai' was calculated for the tithing 
 of cattle ; a third, from the first day of Tisri— that is, from the new moon 
 of September — from which the years from the creation of the world were 
 reckoned ; and a fourth, from the first day of the eleventh month, Schehet 
 — from which the age of trees was counted, for the payment of tithes, and 
 for noting the time when it became lawful to eat the fruit. 
 
 The stir made to catch the first glimpse of the new moon would be a 
 great event each month, even in a retired place like Nazareth. Jesus 
 would hear how, on the last day of each month, men were jDOsted on all 
 the heights round Jerusalem to watch for it ; how they hastened, at the 
 utmost speed, to the Temple, with the news, even if it were Sabbath, and 
 how the sacred trumpet sounded to announce it, and special sacrifices were 
 offered. The appearance of the new moon had in all ages been a great day 
 in Israel, as it also was among the Greeks and Eomans. The Eabbis af- 
 firmed that God Himself had spoken of it to Moses, and told him how to 
 observe it. All over the land it was celebrated, monthly, by special reli- 
 gious solemnities, and by universal rejoicing; in some months more than 
 in others ; every one in Jerusalem, who could, repairing to the Temple, 
 and all, elsewhere, making it a point to attend the synagogue on that day. 
 In the fondly remembered times of the jiast, the day of the new moon had 
 been that on which, especially, the people flocked to the prophets to re- 
 ceive instruction, and on which their ancestors, at some periods, had been 
 wont to worship, from their roofs, the returning light, as that of the Queen 
 of Heaven. 
 
 Many things would impress this event on the Nazareth children. They 
 doubtless noticed how all the men of the village watched fi'om their doors, 
 each month, for the new light, and they had often heard their fathei's, with 
 covered heads, repeat the prayer still used by every pious Jew at first see- 
 ing it—" Blessed be Thou, Lord, our God ! who, through Thy Word, didst 
 create the heavens, and their whole host, by the breath of Thy mouth. 
 He appointed them a law and time that they should not go back from their 
 places. Joyfully and gladly they fulfil the will of their Creator, whose 
 working and whose works are truth. He spoke to the moon, and com- 
 manded her that she should renew herself in glory and splendour, for 
 those whom He has carried from their mother's breast, for thej', too, will 
 be one day renewed like her, and glorify their Creator after the honour of 
 His kingdom. Blessed be Thou, Lord, who renewest the moons." Nor 
 would the simple household feast that followed be unnoticed, with its in- 
 vited guests, nor the Sabbath rest of all from their daily work, for it must 
 have been a welcome monthly holiday to the school children of Nazareth. 
 
 The great festival of the Hebrew year — the Passover and the feast of 
 Unleavened Bread — began on the ISth day of Nisan, the first month, and 
 lasted till the 22nd. It was one of the three yearly feasts which every 
 Israelite, if he could, attended in Jerusalem. Like circumcision, which, 
 indeed, was hardly thought so sacred, its due observance was esteemed a 
 vital necessity, on no account to be neglected in any year. It was the 
 annual sacrament of the whole Jewish race. The Passover lamb was the 
 one offering which all presented spontaneously. It not only commemo-
 
 SOCIAL INFLDENCES. 129 
 
 rated a national deliverance — the " passing over " of Israel by the destroy- 
 ing angel, but was believed to secure the same mercy for themselves 
 hereafter. Every one regarded it as a debt ho owed, and must by all 
 means pay, if he would be counted worthy of a part in the congregation of 
 Israel. It was, in fact, a household sacrifice, Avhicli each family offered on 
 its own behalf, that its transgressions through the year might be " passed 
 over." Even till the later ages of Jewish history the father of each house- 
 hold himself killed the male lamb or goat required, and sprinkled the 
 blood on the lintel and doorposts, as an expiation for the family as a whole, 
 and for any who might have joined them in keeping the feast. 
 
 Pious Israelites were careful to accustom their children, from the ear- 
 liest years, to the requirements of their religion, and hence often brought 
 them with them to Jerusalem at the great feasts. Indeed, even the liberal 
 school of Hillel made it binding to do so as soon as a child was able, 
 with the help of its father's hand, to climb the flight of steps into the 
 Temple courts. 
 
 The Passover itself was eaten only by males, but the week of the feast 
 was a time of universal rejoicing, so that husbands were wont to take their 
 wives, as well as their sons, with them. 
 
 Joseph and Mary went to Jerusalem, every year, to this Festivity, and 
 took Jesus with them, for the first time, when He was twelve years old. 
 Like His cousin John, He had grown in mind and body, and showed a 
 sweet religious spirit. The journey must have been the revelation of a 
 new world to Him — a world, beyond the hills of Samaria, which had 
 hitherto seemed the limit of the earth, as He looked away to them from 
 the hill-top behind ITazareth. 
 
 Only a Jew could realize the feelings such a visit must have raised even 
 in a child. Jerusalem, to the Israelite, was more, if possible, than Mecca 
 is to the Mahometan. The whole " land of Israel " was " holy," since it, 
 only, could offer to God the first-fruits, or the firstborn, or the "perpetual" 
 shewbread. Its walled towns were still " holier." No leper was allowed 
 in them, and a corpse carried out to burial could not be brought into a 
 town again. But Jerusalem, the sacred city, the seat of the Temple, had a 
 sanctity all its own. By Eabbinical laws, which, however, were, doubtless, 
 often neglected, even holy offerings, of the lower kinds, and second tithes, 
 might be eaten in it. The dead must be carried out before sunset of the 
 day of death. 'No houses could be let for lodgings ; and no sepulchres, 
 except those of the house of David, and of Huldah, the prophetess, had 
 been tolerated. ISTo impurity was suliered, lest creeping things should 
 defile the holy city ; nor could scaffolds be set up against the walls, for a 
 similar fear of defilement. Smoke from household fires was forbidden ; 
 poultry were unlawful, becavise they scratched up the soil, and might de- 
 file passing offerings ; no leper could enter the gates ; gardens were pro- 
 hibited, because the decaying leaves and the manure would make an 
 offensive smell. Superstition had invented the most amazing fancies, as 
 jjroofs of the passing holiness of the city in its whole extent, and these 
 were, doubtless, universally and implicitly believed. It was maintained 
 that no serpent or scorpion ever harmed any one in Jerusalem ; that no fly 
 
 K
 
 130 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 was ever seen in tlie place for slaughtering the sacrifices ; that no rain 
 ever put out the fire of the altar, and that no wind ever blew aside the 
 pillar of smoke over the altar. But the hospitality of the holy city was 
 less open to question ; for it was a common boast that no one had ever 
 failed to find friendly entertainment, or a hearth on which to roast his 
 passover. However churlish to all besides, the hospitality of the citizens 
 to their own nation was unbounded. 
 
 But if the city were holy, it.was mainly so because of the far greater 
 holiness of the sanctuary within its bounds. The Temple mountain held 
 the fourth place in local holiness. The ceremonially unclean could not 
 enter it. The space between the court of the heathen and the inner courts 
 — the Zwinger, or Chel — ranked next ; none but Israelites could enter it, 
 and not even they, if defiled by a dead body. The women's court came 
 next. No unclean person, even after batliing, could enter it till sunset. 
 The Forecourt of the Israelites was still holier. JSTo one coiild go into it 
 who needed expiation to be made for him. Even the clean must bathe be- 
 fore entering, and any unclean person intruding, through oversight, must 
 atone for his error by a trespass-offering. The Forecourt of the Priests 
 was yet more sacred. None but the priests or Levites could cross its 
 threshold, except on special occasions, specified by the Law. The space 
 between the altar and the Temple had a still greater sanctity, for, into it, 
 no priest with any bodily defect, or with his hair in disorder, or with a 
 torn robe, or who had tasted wine, could enter. The Temple itself stood 
 apart, in the tenth and highest degree of sanctity. Before entering it, 
 every priest had to wash both hands and feet. In this revered centre, 
 however, there was one spot more awful than all the rest — the Holy of 
 Holies, which the high priest alone could enter, and he only once a year, 
 on the great Day of Atonement, in the peformance of the rites of the day, 
 which required his entering it four times. 
 
 Such a country and city could not fail to be the objects of abiding and 
 passionate sentiment. Affection for their native land led to the unique 
 historical phenomenon of the return of the exiles froin Babylon. Many 
 psalms of the period still record how the captives wept by the rivers of 
 Babylon when they remembered Zion, and hung their harps on the 
 willows of their banks ; and the same intense longing for Palestine is 
 illustrated even yet, by the fond fancy of the Targum that the bodies of the 
 righteous Jews who die in foreign lands, make their way, under gromid, 
 to the Mount of Olives, to share in the resurrection of the just, of which 
 it is to be the scene. The wailing of the Jews of Jerusalem over their 
 ruined Temple, as they lean against the few stones of it which yet remain, 
 shows the same feeling, and it is shared by all the race so strongly, that 
 some earth from the land of their fathers is sprinkled on the grave of 
 every Jew that dies away from it, to make him rest in peace. 
 
 Love of their mother-land, however, was not especially that which 
 linked the Jews of all countries in Christ's day into a great brotherhood, 
 and attracted them continually to Jerusalem, for they were voluntarily 
 settled, far and wide, in foreign lands. Nor was it their longing for 
 freedom and independence, for they were contented subjects of all forms
 
 SOCIAL INFLUENCES. 131 
 
 of government. Their eyes were everywliere turned to the Temple, and 
 they found in it the centre of their national unity. Their heavenly and 
 earthly fatherland seemed to meet in its sacred enclosure. From all the 
 earth, -wherever a Jew lived, rose the same cry as that of the exiles at the 
 sources of the Jordan: "As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, 
 so panteth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, 
 for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God? I pour 
 out my soul in me when I remember these things — how I Avent with the 
 pilgrim bands, and marched up with them to the house of God, with the 
 voice of joy and praise ; with the festive crowd ! " To the Jews of every 
 land it was the crown and glory of their religious system. In their 
 scattered synagogues and houses of prayer they looked towards it at 
 every service. Their gifts and offerings flowed to it in a golden stream, 
 partly to satisfy the requirements of the Law, but even more to gratify 
 their religious devotion. Every Jew over twenty throughout the world 
 gave his didrachma yearly — in payment of the first-fruits required by the 
 Law — to maintain the Temple and its saci'ifices. Constant voluntary 
 gifts, besides,— often of great value— streamed into the holy treasury. 
 Tithes, also, were claimed by the Kabbis from all Jews abroad as well as 
 at home, and were doubtless given by the devout. " In almost every 
 town," says Philo, " there is a chest for the sacred money, and into this 
 the dues are put. At fixed times it is entrusted to the foremost men to 
 carry it to Jerusalem. The noblest are chosen from every town to take up 
 the Hope of all Jews, untouched, for on this payment of legal dues rests 
 the hope of the devout." Egypt, though it had a Temple of its own at 
 Leontopolis, sent this yearly tribute regularly ; it came constantly from 
 Rome and all the "West ; from Lesser Asia and all Syria. But it flowed 
 in the richest stream from Babylonia and the countries beyond the 
 Euphrates, from which it was brought up under the protection of 
 thousands, who volunteered to escort it to Jerusalem, and protect it from 
 plunder by the Parthians on the way. 
 
 Thus Jerusalem and the Temple were the grand religious centre of all 
 Israel, to the remotest limits of its wanderings. The Sanctuary lived in 
 every heart. To maintain it inviolate was the one common anxiety. 
 Foreign rulers might hold sway over Palestine, and even over Jerusalem, 
 and so long as the Temple was left untouched, submission was paid them, 
 as the will of fate. If, however, the haughtiness or greed of the enemy 
 violated, or even only threatened, the Sanctuary, there ran through the 
 whole Jewish world a feeling of indignation that roused them at once, and 
 at the cry that the Temple was in danger, weapons were grasped and 
 solemn prayers rose, and one deep resolve pervaded all— to shed the last 
 drop of their blood on the battle-field or at the Altar, for Jerusalem and 
 the Sanctuary. 
 
 It must have been a wonderful sight to the child Jesus to visit the Holy 
 City at the season of the Passover. The multitudes who flocked to tlie 
 feast from all countries were countless. " Many thousands," says Philo, 
 " from many thousand towns and cities, make a pilgrimage to the Temple 
 at every feast ; some by land, others by sea, from the east and the
 
 132 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 west, the north and the south. Even at Pentecost, which attracted a 
 much smaller number, vast crowds of Jews and pi^oselytes were present 
 from every part of the Eoman empire, which was nearly equivalent to the 
 then known world. Josephus reckoned the numbers attending a single 
 Passover at 2,700,000, inclusive of the population of the city. Every house 
 in the narrow limits of Jerusalem was crowded with pilgrims, and the 
 whole landscape round covered with the tents or booths, of mat, and 
 wicker work, and interwoven leaves, extemporized to serve as shelter — 
 like the similar structures of the Easter pilgrims still— for those who 
 could not be accommodated in any house. The routes by which they 
 travelled to the Holy City from all lands must have been like those to 
 Mecca, at certain seasons, even now : countless vessels laden with living 
 freights of pilgrims : all the main lines of road thronged with huge cara- 
 vans : every port of the Mediterranean, and every city and town on the 
 highways leading to the great centre, thronged as with the passage of 
 armies. The vast " dispersion "—Jewish l)y birth, sentiment, or adoption 
 — converged more and more densely on the one point, — Jerusalem. Par- 
 thians, Medes, Elamites, and Mesopotamians, in the costume of the far 
 East, with their long trains of camels and mules ; crowds from every 
 province of Lesser Asia — Cajjpadocia, Pontus, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, 
 each band with the distinctive characteristics of its own district ; swarthy 
 multitudes, in long caravans, or afoot, — after a sea voyage to Joppa or 
 Caesarea — from Egypt, the head-quarters of the foreign Jews, and from 
 Libya and Cyi'ene ; pilgrims even from imperial Rome ; men from the 
 slopes of Cretan Ida, and from the far-ofE cities and towns of sandy 
 Arabia, met under the shadow of the Temple. The whole world, in a 
 sense, was gathered to one spot, and this, itself, to a mind such as that of 
 the boy Jesus, must have been rich in the most varied influence and 
 knowledge. 
 
 The appearance of the city would make an impression never to be for- 
 gotten. If there were no gardens in Jerusalem, there was a girdle of 
 them reaching from its very walls, down the valleys, and up the opi:)osite 
 hill-sides ; one of them so famous that the figs from it were sold for three 
 or four assarii each. The garden walls and ditches netted over all the 
 approaches to the city, on each side. On the hills around rose the man- 
 sions of the rich citizens, and at the bend where the valleys of Kidron 
 and Hinnom met, beside the Pool of Siloam, the eye regaled itself with 
 the wide and rich verdure of the royal gardens. 
 
 As Joseph, and Mary with her Son, came in sight of the city from the 
 north, they would be on ground as high as Mount Zion : and rising, to 
 the north-west of the city, even a few feet higher, while on the west, Zion 
 rose, on an average, about 100 feet above the hills across the Valley of 
 Hinnom ; and, on the east, the Mount of Olives overtopped the highest 
 part of the city by 100 feet, and the Temple hill by no less than 300. 
 Except on the north, however, the high ground was divided from Jeru- 
 salem by deep valleys, which could be reached from within the city only 
 by steep streets and roads. The pilgrims encam]5cd in the valleys of 
 Kidron or Hinnom saw the buildings and towers of Mount Zion more than
 
 SOCIAL INFLUENCES. 133 
 
 500 feet above thom ; and those whose tents were pitched not far from the 
 same place, at Joab's Well, were nearly 600 feet below the houses of the 
 upper city. The Court of the Priests looked over to the Pool of Siloam, 
 370 feet below ; and from Mount Zion it needed a descent of 264 feet to 
 reach the Garden of Gethsemane, in the Valley of the Kidron. 
 
 Jerusalem was thus, pre-eminentlj', a mountain city, surroiinded on all 
 sides by hills, and with hills, famous and sacred beyond all others, as its 
 own site. Tlie road from Nazareth entered the new lower town, by the 
 Damascus gate, and passed through the most stirring business street — in 
 the bottom of the Valley of the Cheesemakers, or the Tyropoeon : a deep 
 and narrow hollow between Mounts Zion and Moriah ; then crowded with 
 the narrow lanes which serve for streets in Eastern cities. In the new 
 town, under the shadow of the i^o hills, were the shops of the braziers ; 
 the clothes' bazaar, and the square where the authorities received an- 
 nouncements of the new moon, and gave the public feasts that followed, 
 monthly. In the Tyropoeon, the streets ran in terraces, up the steep sides 
 of the hill, side lanes climljing here and there, to the top, past the bazaar 
 of the butchers, and that of the wool-dealers, to the upper street, where 
 Tsmael Ben Camithi, the high priest at the time, having gone out on the 
 great Day of Atonement, to speak with a heathen, a fleck of spittle fell on 
 his clothes, from the lips of the uncircumcised, and defiled him, so that he 
 could not perform the services of the day, and had to get his brother to 
 take his place. 
 
 On the west of the Tyi'opoeon, on the top of Mount Zion, rose the old, 
 or upper city, known also as the City of David. In it were the shops of 
 the goldsmiths, and the houses of the priests who lived in Jerusalem. 
 The Wall of David ran along its north side, opening through the gate 
 Gennath, to Akra, or the lower town. High above this wall, which was 
 over fifty feet in height, rose the three famous castles — Hijipikus, 
 Phasaelus, and Mariamne — built by Herod the Great, and then fresh from 
 the builder's hands. Of these, Hippikus, stern and massive, towered 120 
 feet above the wall, at its north-west corner ; a great square of huge 
 stones, in successive stories, the upper one surmounted by battlements 
 and turrets. Close by, and in a line with it, rose Phasaelus, the splendid 
 memorial to Herod's brother Phasael, who had beaten out his brains 
 against the walls of his dungeon when a prisoner of the Parthians. It, 
 also, was square, for sixty feet of its height above the wall, but from 
 amidst the breastworks and bulwarks of this lower fortress, rose a second 
 tower, about seventy feet higher, with magnificent battlements and turrets. 
 Within, this upper tower was like a palace, and it was, doubtless, in- 
 tended as a refuge for the king, in case of necessity. Mariamne, the 
 smallest of the three castles, was about thirty feet square, and about 
 seventy-five in height, but its upper half was more highly finished than 
 that of either of the others, as if to quiet its builder's conscience for the 
 murder of her whose name it Ijore. All three fortresses, towering thus 
 grandly aloft, above the high wall, — which itself rose along the crest of a 
 high hill, — were of white marble : each stone thirty feet long, fifteen in 
 breadth, and from seven to eisht in thickness ; and all squared so exactly
 
 134 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 that their joiuiugs could hardly be seen. " Each tower," to use the words 
 of Josephus, " looked like a great natural rock which had been cut by the 
 workman into shajoe, like the rock-hewn buildings of Edom." 
 
 Under the protection of these splendid structures rose the new palace of 
 Herod, about the centre of the northern half of Mount Zion, a great jiart 
 of which was enclosed within its park walls, themselves a second line of 
 defence, forty-five feet in height, with strong towers rising, at equal dis- 
 tances, from their broad tops. The palace itself was indescribably 
 magnificent. Sjjacious rooms, with elabora^tely carved walls and ceilings, 
 many of them crusted with precious stones, displayed Oriental splendour 
 to hundreds of guests at a time. Gold and silver shone on every side. 
 Round this sumptuous abode, porticoes with curious pillars of costly 
 stone, offered wide, shady retreats. Grqres and gardens stretched around, 
 intermingled with pools and artificial rivers, bordered by long, delightful 
 walks, frequented, through the day, by all who could endure the desecration 
 of Jerusalem by the countless statues which adorned them. 
 
 The theatre built by Herod, to the horror of the nation, was also, aip- 
 parently, in this part of the city ; and outside, at a little distance, was the 
 amphitheatre, an object of still greater popular aversion, from its gladia- 
 torial shows, in which men condemned to death fought with wild beasts. 
 Inscrijitions in honour of Augustus, and trophies of the nations Herod 
 had conquered in his wars, adorned the exterior of the theatre ; and the 
 games in the circus, though shunned by the Jews, were celebrated with 
 the greatest pomp, strangers from all the neighbouring countries being 
 invited to them. The trophies round the theatre especially excited in- 
 dignation, being supposed to cover images, and hence being looked upon 
 as heathen idols. So great, indeed, had the excitement become, in Herod's 
 lifetime, that, for polic}^, he had caused the armour to be taken from some 
 of them, in j^resence of the leading men, to show that there was nothing 
 but shapeless wood beneath. Yet even this did not calm the people, and 
 no Jew passed the hated building without the bitterest feelings at its 
 presence in the holy city. 
 
 On the eastern crest of Zion stood the old palace of the Asmonean kings, 
 and, north of it, an open space surroxinded by a lofty covered colonnade, 
 known as the Xystus. A bridge spanned the Tyropoeon Yalley to the 
 south-west corner of the Temple enclosure, and near the Xystus rose a 
 hall, known as the. Hall of the King's Council. The main streets ran north 
 and south— some along the brow of the hill, others lower down, but 
 parallel, following the course of the valley, with side lanes or narrow 
 streets connecting them. They had raised pavements, either because of 
 the slope of the ground, or to allow passers-by to avoid contact with per- 
 son or things ceremonially unclean. The upper city was mainly devoted 
 to dwelling-houses of the Ijetter kind ; but in the lower city, bazaars, or 
 street-like markets were then, as now, a prominent feature, each devoted 
 to a siiecial branch of commerce. 
 
 Looking out at the Gennath gate on the north of Zion, the Almond pool, 
 near at hand, refreshed the eye. Beyond it, across a little valley, slightly 
 to the north-Avest, near the Joppa road, was Psephinos, another of the
 
 SOCIAL INFLUENCES. 135 
 
 castles by wliich the city was at once defended and overawed. It rose iu 
 an octagcni, high into the clear blue, showing from its battlements tho 
 whole sn^eep of the country, from the sea-coast to beyond the Dead Sea, 
 and from the far north, away towards Edom, on the south. In Christ's 
 day it stood outside the city, by itself, but soon after His death it was in- 
 cluded in the line of wall built by Herod Agrippa. 
 
 The northern part of the lower town, known as Akra, was mainly in- 
 teresting for the bustle of restless city life of every colour which it pre- 
 sented. The wood bazaar, the city council-house, and public records office, 
 were in it. Nor was it destitute of attractions, for the double pool of 
 Bethesda lay at its north-east corner. The Temple and its courts occupied 
 nearly the whole of Mount Moriah, the second hill on which the city was 
 built, the only other building on it contrasting strangely in appearance 
 and character. It was the great fortress Antonia, at the north-west 
 corner, on an isolated rock, separated by a cleft from Mount Moriah, and 
 cased with stone where exposed, so that no foe could scale it. The castle 
 occupied, with its enclosures, nearly a third of the great Temple plateau, 
 and was built originally by John Hyrcanus, but had been rebuilt by Herod 
 with great magnificence, with baths, fountains, galleries, piazza, and great 
 rooms, to fit it for a residence for princely guests. It served now as the 
 cjuarters of the Roman garrison, sent from Cffisarea at the time of the 
 great feasts, to keep peace in the city. In Christ's day the robes of the 
 high priest were kept in it by the Eomans, to prevent a seditious use of 
 them. Covered ways led from the castla to the Temple area, to allow the 
 soldiery free access in case of tumult or disturbance. 
 
 Such was the city to which Jesus now came for the first time. As He 
 was led through its crowded streets, and saw its famous palaces, and 
 towers, and marts, and above all, the Temple, what strange thoughts must 
 have risen in the opening mind of the wondrous boy. 
 
 The panorama spread before Him from the city, at its different points, 
 was no less filled with interest. From the Temple He looked eastward to 
 Mount Olivet, then crowned by two great cedars, ixnderneath which were 
 booths for the sale of all things needed for ceremonial purifications, in- 
 cluding the doves for the various offerings. He would no doubt hear how, 
 in former times, beacon fires had been kindled on the hill-top at each new 
 moon, and how mountain after mountain, catching the sight, spread the 
 news in an hour over the whole land. Some one would, doubtless, also, 
 tell Him that it was the hated Samaritans who had brought the custom 
 to an end, by holding up lights at wrong times, and thus jnisleadmg 
 Israel. 
 
 The Valley of the Kidron, below, would be equally interesting. It was 
 to it the pilgrims came down at the Feast of Tabernacles, to cut the long 
 boughs of willow which they carried in procession to the Temple, and laid 
 bending over the altar. On the eve of the first day of the feast, Jesus 
 would see men sent Ijy the Temple authorities — a great crowd following — 
 to cut the sheaf of first-fruits. Perhaps He saw the three reapers, with 
 basket and sickle, step to spots previously marked out, asking, as they 
 stood beside the new barley, " Has the sun set yet ? Is this the right
 
 136 THE LIFE OF CIIIUST. 
 
 sickle ? Is this the right basket ? " and, if it were Sabbath, " Is this the 
 Sabbatli ? " — to bo followed by another question, thrice repeated, " Shall I 
 cut P " Avhich was answered with what seems, now, childish formality, but 
 then thrilled all hearts, " Cut." Eeligious bitterness lay behind all this 
 minute triviality, for did not the hated aristocratic Sadducees maintain 
 that the first sheaf should be cut only on the first week-day of the feast, 
 which would have affected the date of Pentecost, fifty days later ? The 
 child from Nazareth w^ould follow, when the sheaf, thus reaped, was 
 carried, amidst great rejoicings, to the forecourt of the Temple, and pre- 
 sented by the priest as a heave-offering ; then threshed, winnowed, and 
 cleansed, dried over a sacred fire, and forthwith ground into flour, the 
 finest of which was the new-harvest " meat-offering " before God. He 
 knew that till this had been presented at the altar, no field could be cut, 
 except to get fodder for cattle, or for other necessary ends. 
 
 Looking into the Yalley of Hinnom from the southern end of the Temple, 
 with its magnificent Eoyal porch. His eyes must have turned from the 
 sight one spot in it offered, the fires kept up, night and day, to burn all 
 the garbage and offal of the Temple, and the refuse of the city— the 
 symbol of the unquenchable flames of the Pit. It was in this valley that 
 children had been burned alive to Moloch in the old idolatrous times, and 
 the remembrance of this, with the foulness of the pai't where the perpetual 
 fires now burned, had made Gehenna — the name of the valley — the word 
 used afterwards even by Jesus Himself, for the place of the lost. 
 
 Between Hinnom and Kidron, where the two valleys met at the south- 
 east of the city. His eyes, looking down from the Temple Mount, would 
 rest on the contrasted sweetness of the softly-flowing waters of Siloam, 
 Avhich bubbled up noiselessly at the foot of the hill, and after filling a 
 double pool, glided on to the south, till they lost themselves in the king's 
 gardens. 
 
 City and people : the past and the present, must have filled the whole 
 being of the Child with awe and wonder, for He now stood, for the first 
 time, under the shadow of His Father's Temple, and the murmur of 
 countless languages that filled the air, was, in very truth, homage to that 
 Father from all the world. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 THE PASSOVEB, VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 
 
 r 1 1 HE vast multitudes coming to the Passover ai'ranged to reach Jcru- 
 -■- salem, at the latest, on the 14th of Nisan, on the evening of which the 
 feast was celebrated. In the city, however, there had been a great stir for 
 some days already, in anticipation of the solemnity. So far back as from 
 the 15th of the preceding month, all the bridges and roads, far and near, 
 had been begun to be repaired. All graves near the lines of travel, or 
 round Jerusalem, had been cither fenced in, or the head-stones had been 
 whitewashed, that thoy might be seen from a distance, and thus warn off
 
 THE PASSOVER VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 137 
 
 the pilgrims, Avbom they might otherwise have defiled, and made unfit for 
 the feast. The fields, throughout the whole country, had been anxiously 
 gone over, to see if they w'erc unclean by any plants growing together in 
 them, which the Law forbade in more than one text. On the Sabbath 
 immediately preceding the 14th — the Great Sabbath — special services had 
 been held in all the synagogues and in the Temple itself, and the Eabbis 
 had discoursed to the people on the laws and meaning of the festival. 
 The lambs, or he goats, had been selected, in earlier times, on the 10th, 
 from the vast flocks driven to the city at this season to supply the Pass- 
 over demand. But this was impossible now, as the pilgrims arrived, 
 mostly, after that day. Only male lambs, or he goats, of a year old, and 
 without blemish, could be used, and they were selected with the most 
 scrupulous care by the head of each company of relatives or neighbours, 
 who j^roposed to eat the feast together. 
 
 The fourteenth day, which began at sunset of the loth, was also the first 
 day of the feast of '* Unleavened Bread," and was hence known as the 
 " preparation day." No particle of leaven could be left in any house. The 
 head of each family, as the evening closed, began the household purifica- 
 tion with the prayer — "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the 
 universe, who sanctified us with Thy commandments, and requirest us to 
 remove the leaven," and then proceeded, in rigorous silence, to search every 
 room, gathering every crumb that could be found, and finally tying all up 
 till the following morning. A further search, which must end before noon, 
 was then made for any liquid or solid product of fermented grain, and for 
 all dishes or vessels that had held it. All were taken out of the house, 
 and the crumbs and dough carefully burned, Avith a repetition of pre- 
 scribed prayers. The house itself was then cleansed in every part, and 
 no one could enter the unpurified house of a heathen, henceforth, during 
 the feast, without being defiled. Nothing leavened could be eaten or per- 
 mitted in the house during the next seven days, — for defilement, bringing 
 with it unfitness to eat the Passover, would follow in either case. 
 
 This purification of the house, however, was by no means all. Vessels of 
 any kind, to be used at the feast, were cleansed with prescribed rites, in a 
 settled mode. Metal dishes, etc., after being scoured, must be first dipped 
 in boiling water— in a pot used for no other purpose— and then into cold. 
 Iron vessels must be made red-hot ; then washed in the same way. Iron 
 mortars, for crushing grain for baking, were filled with red coals, till a 
 thread, tied outside, was burned through. "Wooden vessels, after being 
 wetted, were rubbed with a red-hot stone. No clay dish could be used at 
 all if not quite new, and it had to be first dipped thrice in running water, 
 and consecrated by a special prayer. Personal purity was as strictly 
 enforced. Every one had to cut his hair and nails, and to take a bath. 
 
 The baking of the unleavened bread was accomi^anied with equally 
 formal care. On the evening of the 1.3th, " before the stars appeared," the 
 head of each household went out and drew water for the purjiose, uttering 
 the words as he did so, " This is the water for the unleavened bread," and 
 covering the vessel that contained it, for fear of any defilement. In grind- 
 ing the flour, the most anxious care was observed to keep all leaven from
 
 138 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 coming near the woman at the mill, and to take no grain tliat was at all 
 damp, lest it might have begun to ferment. After baking, one loaf, to bo 
 taken to the priest at the Temple, was laid aside, with another prescribed 
 prayer. 
 
 The afternoon of the 14th was a time of the intensest bustle, for the 
 rams' horn trumpets would pi-esently announce, from the Temple, the 
 beginning of the feast. At the sound, every one took his lamb to the 
 Temple, the court walls of which were gaily hung with many-coloured 
 carpets and tapestries, in honour of the day. The countless victims must 
 be first examined by the priests, to see if they were without blemish, then 
 slaughtered and prepared for roasting, in the forecourts of the Temple, by 
 the heads of the different households, or by men deputed by them, or by 
 the Leyites in attendance, with indescribable haste and confusion, for there 
 was more than work enough for all, to kill, almost at the same time, the 
 256,000 lambs sometimes required. The exact time for slaying the victims 
 was " between the evenings, "irom sunset of the l-lth till the stars appeared, 
 though they might be killed in the last three hours of the day. 
 
 As soon as the courts were full, the gates were shut on the multitude 
 within, each holding his lamb. Three blasts of trumpets then announced 
 the beginning of the heavy task. Long rows of priests, with gold and 
 silver bowls, stood ranged between the altar and the victims, to catch the 
 blood, and pass it on from one to the othei', till the last poui'ed it on the 
 altar, from which it ran off, through pipes beneath. When the lamb had 
 been drained of blood, the head of the family to which it belonged took it 
 to the hooks on the walls and pillars round, where it was opened and 
 skinned. The tail, which, in the sheep of Palestine, often weighs many 
 pounds, and the fat, were handed to the nearest priest, and passed on till 
 they reached the altar, to be burned as an offering to God. The lamb was 
 killed without the usual laying of the hands on its head. It was now ready 
 to be carried away, and was borne off by the family head in its skin, which 
 Tfas afterwards to be given to the host in whose house the feast might be 
 held. 
 
 ISTot fewer than ten, but as many as twenty, might sit down at a com- 
 pany. Women were allowed to join their households, though it was not 
 recpiired that they should eat the Passover ; and lads from fourteen, and 
 even slaves and foreigners, if circumcised, sat down with the rest. Every- 
 thing was hurried, for the lambs were required to be killed, roasted, and 
 eaten, between three in the afternoon and nine or twelve at night. They 
 were, properly, to be eaten in the courts of the Temple, but this, after a 
 time, having become impossible, they might be consumed anywhere within 
 the Rabbinical limits of the city. Thousands of fires, in special ovens, pre- 
 pared them ; for they must be roasted only; not boiled, or cooked except in 
 this way. They were trussed with spits of pomegranate wood, inserted in 
 the form of a cross, and the whole creature roasted entire. K'one of the 
 flesh was allowed to remain till morning, any fragments left being forth- 
 with burned, that they might not be defiled. The very dross and attitude 
 of all v/ho took part had been originally prescribed, but these details were 
 now out of use.
 
 THE TASSOVER VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 139 
 
 The feast itself must liavc impressed a child like Jesus no less than the 
 preparations. Not a bone of the lamb must be broken, under a penalty of 
 forty stripes, nor must any part of it touch the oven ; and if any fat dropped 
 back on it, the part on which it dropped was cut off. The company having 
 assembled, after the lamps were lighted, arranged themselves in due order, 
 on couches, round the tables, reclining on their left side. A cup of red 
 wine, mixed with water, was filled for every one, and drunk, after a touch- 
 ing benediction, by the head man of the group. A basiii of water and a 
 towel were then brought in, that each might wash his hands, and then 
 another blessing was pronounced. 
 
 A table was then carried into the open space between the couches, and 
 bitter herbs, and unleavened bread, with a dish — made of dates, raisins, 
 and other fruit§, mixed with vinegar to the consistency of lime, in com- 
 memoration of the mortar Avith which their fathers worked in Egypt, — set 
 on it, along with the paschal lamb. The head man now took some of the 
 bitter herbs, dipped them in the dish, and, after giving thanks to God for 
 creating the fruits of the earth, ate a small j^iece, and gave one to each of 
 the company. A second cup of wine and water was then poured out, and 
 the son of the house, or the youngest boy present, asked the meaning of 
 the feast. The questions to be put had been minutely fixed by the Rabbis, 
 and were as formally and minutely answered in apjiointed words, the whole 
 story of the deliverance from Egypt being thus repeated, year after year, 
 at every Passover table, in the very same terms, throughout all Israel. 
 
 The first part of the great Hallelujah — Psalms cxiii. and cxiv.— was now 
 chanted, and was followed by a prayer beginning, " Blessed art Thou, O 
 Lord, our God, King of the universe, who hast redeemed us and our fore- 
 fathers from Egypt." A third cup was now poured out, and then came 
 the grace after meals. A fourth and last cup followed, and then Psalms 
 cxv., cxvi., cxvii., and cxviii., which formed the rest of the Hallelujah, and 
 another prayer, closed the feast. 
 
 At midnight the gates of the Temple were once more opened, and the 
 people, who seldom slept that night, poured through them, in their 
 holiday dress, with thank-offerings, in obedience to the command that 
 none should appear before the Lord empty. Of these gifts the priests 
 took their rightful share, and gave back the rest to the offerers, who had 
 it cooked for them in the Court of the Women, and sat down to a second 
 feast in the Temple cloisters, or in some part of the town, within the 
 limits of which alone it was lawful to eat such food. 
 
 The whole week was full of interest. The 15th was kept like a Sabbath. 
 It was one of the six days of the year on which the Law prohibited all 
 servile work. Only what was necessary for daily life might be done. It 
 was a day for rest, and for the presentation of freewill offerings in the 
 Temple. 
 
 It was on the third day that the first-fruits of the hai^vest were brought 
 from the Kidron valley to the Temple, to be waved before God in solemn 
 acknowledgment of His bounty in giving the kindly fruits of the earth. 
 This incident Jesus, doubtless, saw. He would notice, besides, how the 
 sheaf had no sooner been offered than the sta-eets were filled with sellers
 
 140 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 of bread made of new barley, parched ears of the young crop, and early 
 growths and fruits of all kinds, which had been kept back till then. 
 
 From the 17th to the 20th the days were only half holy, and many of 
 the people had already begun to leave Jerusalem. Crowds still remained, 
 however, to enjoy the great holiday time of the year, and the days and 
 even the nights, with their bright moon, went merrily by. 
 
 The last day, the 21st, like the first, was kept as a Sabbath. Only 
 necessary work was permitted, and it closed with the rehearsal of the 
 Passover supper, for the sake of those who could not come up on the first 
 great day of the feast. 
 
 But amidst all the sights and wonders of the week one specially in- 
 terested Jesus. His heart was already set supremely on " His Father's 
 house," the Temple. Can we doubt that, with the early habits of the 
 East, He found time to watch its daily service throughout ? 
 
 This began, in reality, the night before. The priests required for the 
 services of the next day, or to watch through the night, assembled in the 
 evening in the great Fire Chamber. The keys of the Temple, and of the 
 inner forecourts, were then handed them by their brethren whom they 
 relieved, and hidden below the marble floor. The Levites on watch 
 through the night, or to serve next day, also received the keys of the 
 outer forecourts from their brethren whose duties were over. Besides 
 these, twenty-four representatives of the people, on duty, — men delegated 
 by the nation to represent it, — at the daily sacrifices, were also present. 
 
 As the morning service began very early, everything was put in train 
 beforehand. Ninety-three vessels and instruments needed for it were 
 received from the retiring Levites, and carried to a silver table on the 
 south of the Great Altar, to be readj^. The gates of the Temple building 
 itself, and of the inner forecourts, were locked up for the night, the key 
 once more put in its place, the priest who had charge of it kissing the 
 marble slab as he replaced it, and lying down to sleep over it through the 
 night. The 'gates of the outer forecourts were now also shut, and the 
 watches of priests and Levites set for the night. But the Temple was too 
 sacred to be entrusted to them alone ; the Representatives slejit in it on 
 behalf of the people ; besides some ecclesiastical dignitaries, deputed by 
 the authorities, and one of the higher priests, who w*as to preside over the 
 lots for daily offices next morning. 
 
 Towards dawn, the captain of the watch and some priests rose, took the 
 keys, and passing into the inner forecourt, preceded by torch-bearers, 
 divided into two bands, which went round the Temple courts, to see that 
 all was safe, and every vessel in its right place. 
 
 Meanwhile, the other priests had risen, bathed, and put on their white 
 robes. The duties of each for the day were fixed by lot each morning, to 
 prevent the unseemly quarrels, resulting even in bloodshed, which had 
 formerly risen. Assembling in a special chamber, all stood in a circle, 
 and the lot was taken by counting a given number from any part of the 
 ring, the choice remaining with him whose place made up the figure. 
 Meanwhile, the Levites and Eej^resentatives Avaited the summons to 
 gather. The priests for the dny now once more washed their hands and
 
 THE PASSOVER VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 141 
 
 feet in a brazen laver, whicli, itself, had been kept all nigiit in water, for 
 fear of its being defiled. The feet were left bare while the priests were on 
 duty. 
 
 All the gates were presently opened by the Levites, and the priests blew 
 thrice on their trumpets to announce to the whole city that the worship of 
 the day would soon begin. The Great Altar was fortlnvith cleansed by 
 priests to whose lot this duty had fallen. The singers and musicians of 
 the day, and the priests to blow the trnmjoets at the morning sacrifice, 
 were set apart ; the instruments brought ; the night-watchers dismissed, 
 and then the day's service had begun. All this took jilace by torchlight, 
 before dawn. 
 
 The morning sacrifice could not be slain before the distinct appearance 
 of the morning light. A watcher, therefore, standing on the roof of the 
 Temple, looked out for the first glimpse of Hebron, far off, on the hills, as 
 the sign of morning having come. When it was visible, the summons was 
 given — " Priests, to your ministry ! Levites, to your jolaces ! Israelites, 
 take your stations ! " The priests then once more washed their feet and 
 hands, and the service finally began. 
 
 Entering first the Temple, and then the Holy Place, with lowly rever- 
 ence, a priest now, after jjr&yer, cleansed the altar of incense, gathered the 
 ashes in his hands, and went out slowly, backwards. Another, meanwhile, 
 had laid wood on the Great Altar, and a third brought to the north side of 
 the altar, a year-old lamb, selected four days before, from the pen in the 
 Temple. The Representatives having laid their hands on its head, it was 
 slaughtered with the head to the west side of the Temple, and the blood 
 caught in a bowl, and stirred continually, to prevent its curdling and be- 
 coming unfit for sprinkling. 
 
 The incense offering was now kindled. At the tinkling of a bell, the 
 people in the inner forecourt began to pray, and the priests whose lot it 
 was entered the Holy Place. The first brought out the censer last used, 
 praying and walking backward as he retired. The blood of the lamb was 
 sprinkled on the four sides of the Great Altar as soon as he reappeared. 
 
 A second jariest having now extinguished five of the seven lamps of the 
 golden candlestick in the Holy Place, a third took in a glowing censer and 
 laid it on the altar, prayed, and retired backwards. A fourth now went 
 in, handed the censer to an assistant who followed, shook incense on the 
 coals, prayed, and retired. The two remaining lights were then extin- 
 guished, and the offering ended. 
 
 The skin was now stripped from the slain lamb, the bowels taken out 
 and washed, the body cut in pieces, laid on a marble table, and salted. 
 The food or meat-offering of meal, mixed with oil, and strewed with 
 incense, was then prepared, and a fixed measure of wine poured into a 
 costly cup for the drink-offering. It was now sunrise. 
 
 As the sun rose, the nine pieces of the sacrifice were lifted by nine 
 priests, and carried to the Great Altar, in order — laid on it and consumed 
 — the other priests and the people repeating morning jjrayer. The meat- 
 offering was then laid on the altar, salt and incense added, and then a 
 handful of it was thrown on the altar fire, the rest falling to the priest as
 
 142 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 his perquisite. Twelve cakes, the bread-offering of the high priest, were 
 nest burned, after being strewn with salt. Every detail had occupied a 
 separate priest, and now another poured the wine of the drink-offering 
 into a silver funnel in the altar, through which it ran into a conduit 
 underneath. 
 
 The morning sacrifice was now over. Forthwith two priests sounded 
 their trumpets nine times, and twelve Levites, standing on a raised plat- 
 form in the Court of the Priests, recited the psalms of the day to the 
 music of their instruments, and then came the ancient priestly bene- 
 diction—" The Lord bless thee and keep thee ; the Lord make His face 
 shine ujoon thee, and be gracious unto thee ; the Lord lift up His counten- 
 ance upon thee, and grant thee peace." 
 
 Voluntary offerings, and those required on special grounds, occupied 
 the priests, for a time, after the morning sacrifice. At three in the after- 
 noon the evening sacrifice and incense offering presented the same details, 
 the victim being left on the altar to burn away through the night. At 
 sunset the Sch'ma was read again, and the evening prayer offered; the 
 seven lamps in the Holy Place again kindled and left to burn till morning, 
 and all the vessels cleaned by the Levites, and made ready for next day. 
 
 This daily service was no doubt watched by the child Jesus, who now, 
 for the first time, saw the priests in His Father's house at their ministra- 
 tions. But the city itself would be sure to arrest His notice. At early 
 dawn he would hear the trumpets of the Roman garrison in Antonia, and 
 see the booths open shortly after, on the Mount of Olives. Three trumpet 
 blasts from the Temple had already waked the slumbering citizens and 
 pilgrims, and the first beams of the sun had announced the hour of morn- 
 ing prayer. The streets had already filled in the twilight, for the Oriental, 
 in all ages, has been an early riser. Sheep and cattle dealers, and money- 
 changers, were hurrying to the Court of the Heathen. Worshippers were 
 thronging across the Xystus bridge from the Upper City to the Temple, 
 and through the Market gate, from the Lower Town, along all the streets. 
 The countless synagogues were open for morning service. Men wearing 
 the Greek dress, and speaking Greek, had gathered in some, and other 
 nationalities in others. 
 
 With the first sight of the risen sun every one bowed his head in prayer, 
 wherever at the moment he might be. Yonder a Pharisee, who has pur- 
 posely let the hour overtake him, in the street, suddenly stops, and puts 
 his Tephillin, broader and larger than common, on his forehead and arm. 
 The olive-gatherer, with his basket, prays where he is, in the tree. Pil- 
 grims and citizens are alike bent in prayer. 
 
 It was an uneasy time when Jesus first visited Jerusalem. Archelaus 
 had been banished two years before, and the hateful race of the Edomites 
 no longer reigned in the palace on Zion, but the hopes built on the change 
 to direct government by a Roman Procurator had not been fulfilled. 
 Judea was now only a part of the Roman province, and the first act of the 
 direct imperial rule had been to make a census of the whole country for 
 heathen taxes. Galilee and Judea, alike, had been in wild insurrection, 
 which had been quenched in blood. Men spoke with bated breath, but
 
 THE PASSOVER VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 143 
 
 were at one in deadly hatred of the foreigner, and in the yearning hope 
 that the Messiah might soon appear to drive him out. 
 
 The great bazaar in the Lower New Town was early full of bustle. It 
 was a long street, crowded with stalls, booths, and shops. Fine bread of 
 the wheat of Ephrsim was sold after the second day of the feast. Cakes 
 of figs and raisins ; fish of different kinds from the Sea of Tiberias ; wood- 
 work of all kinds, filled the open stalls. Dibs — the syi^up of grapes — had 
 many sellers, and there were booths for Egyjitian lentiles, and even for 
 cinnamon and pepper. Mechanics plied their trades in the streets, too 
 busy to rise even when a great Rabbi passed. In the side streets trades 
 of every kind filled the roadway. Potters were busy in their sheds-, 
 fruiterers offered choice Jerusalem figs from gardens made rich with the 
 blood of the sacrifices ; flax-beaters pounded their flax in the streets. The 
 numbers of passing priests showed that Jerusalem was the Holy City. 
 Levites, with their peculiar head-dress, and an outside pocket containing 
 a small roll of the Law ; Pharisees, with broad phylacteries and great 
 fringes ; Essenes in white, with the air of old prophets ; gorgeous officials 
 of the governor's court, at present in the city— pilgrims in the costume of 
 every land, and speaking a babel of languages — passed and repassed in 
 endless variety. 
 
 The peojDle of Jerusalem might well value the feasts, for they lived by 
 the vast numbers of pilgrims. The money s^^ent by individuals, though 
 little compared to the wealth which flowed yearly into the Temple treasury, 
 from the whole Dispersion, was great in the aggregate. The gifts in 
 money to the Temple might in part remain there ; but doves, lambs, and 
 oxen were needed for sacrifices, wood for the altar, and all liked to carry 
 home memorials of Jerusalem. The countless priests and Levites, and 
 officials connected with the Temple, caused a great circulation of money, 
 and the building itself, and the requirements of its worshijo, involved 
 constant exjDenditure. We need not, therefore, wonder that Jerusalem 
 was wildly fanatical in its zeal for the Holy Place. It was bound to it not 
 less by self-interest than by religious bigotry. 
 
 Jerusalem, though by no means large, was the headquarters of the great 
 religious institutions, as the capital of the theocracy. Countless scribes, 
 rulers, presbyters, scholars, readers, and servants were connected with its 
 schools and synagogues. It was the seat of all the famous teachers of the 
 Law, the focus of controversy^ the i;niversity town of the Eabbis, the 
 battle-ground of religious parties, — the capital of the Jewish nation, in 
 short, in a measure only possible from its having in its midst the one 
 Temple of the race. It was the Delphi and Olympia of Israel, and how 
 much more ! Such a city, at such a time, must have made lasting impres- 
 sions on the boy Jesus. But His heart was set supremely on higher things 
 than the merely outward and earthly. From His earliest years His 
 mother's faith in the mysterious words spoken by saints and angels re- 
 specting Him, even before His birth, must have shown itself in a thousand 
 ways in her intercourse with Him, and have kindled wonderful thoughts 
 in His boyish mind. We cannot conceive the relations of His divine 
 nature to the human, but it must be safe to follow the Gospels in their
 
 144 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 picture of Him as maturing year by year, from the simplicity of the 
 child to the wisdom and strength of riper years. 
 
 Physical and intellectual ripeness come early in the East. David, 
 Herod, Hyrcanus, and Josephus showed, even in boyhood, traits which in 
 more backward climates mark much later years. Josephus tells us that 
 numbers of Jewish boys put to torture in Egypt, nrider Vespasian, after 
 the fall of Masada, bore unflinchingly the utmost that could be inflicted on 
 them, rather than own Cassar as their lord, and even in our own day 
 children in Palestine are so early matured that marriages of boys of 
 thirteen and girls of eleven are not unknown. Philo, in Christ's day, 
 notes different ages strangely enough to our ideas. " At seven," he says, 
 " a man is a logician and a grammarian ; at fourteen mature, because able 
 to be the father of a being like himself ; while, at twenty-one, growth and 
 bloom are over." " A son of five years," says Juda Ben Tema, " is to read 
 the Scriptures, one of ten to give himself to the Mischna, of thirteen to 
 the Commandments, of fifteen to the Talmud, of eighteen to marriage." 
 
 The Eabbis, perhaps from the tradition that Moses left his father's 
 house when twelve years old, that Samuel had begun to prophesy when he 
 had finished his twelfth year, and that Solomon had delivered some of his 
 famous judgments when as young, had already in Christ's day fixed that 
 age as the close of boyhood and the opening of a manlier life. " After the 
 completion of the twelfth year," says the Talmud, " a boy is to be con- 
 sidered a youth, and is to keep the fast on the Day of Atonement. Till he 
 is thirteen his religious duties are to be performed for him by his father, 
 but on his thirteenth birthday the parent is no longer answerable for lus 
 son's sins." 
 
 Jesus, who had ended His twelfth year when taken up to the Passover, 
 was thus already a " Son of the Law," and, as such, reqiiired to perform 
 all religious duties. The Tephillin or phylacteries had, doubtless, as was 
 usual, been put on Him publicly in the synagogue of Nazareth, to mark 
 the transition from boyhood, to remind Him that He was henceforth to 
 wear them, to keep the fasts, to follow the laws of the Rabbis, and to think 
 seriously of his future calling in life. He would be much freer, therefore, 
 to go where He liked, without supervision, than a boy of the same age with 
 us, and hence all Jerusalem, with its thousand wonders, lay before Him, to 
 study as He chose. 
 
 The week of the feast ended, Joseph and Mary turned their faces to- 
 wards home. The confusion and bustle around must have been indescrib- 
 able. Any one who has seen the motley crowds of Easter pilgrims return- 
 ing from the Jordan at the joresent day may have some faint idea of the 
 scene. The start is always made at night, to escape the great heat of the 
 day, and in the darkness, lighted only by torches, it needs care not to be 
 trampled under foot. At narrow or difficult parts of the road the noise 
 and confusion are bewildering — women in terror of being trampled down 
 by a long file of camels, tied one behind another ; parents calling for lost 
 children ; friends shouting for friends ; muleteers and ass drivers beating 
 and cursing their beasts ; the whole wedged into a moving mass, all alike 
 excited.
 
 THE PASSOVER VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 145 
 
 As the distauco from Jerusalem increased, and different divisions 
 branched off to different roads, danger -would cease, and the scene be- 
 come more picturesque. Veiled -women and venerable men -would pass, 
 mounted on camels, mules, or perhaps horses ; younger men -walking along- 
 side, staff in hand ; children playing at the side of the path as the caval- 
 cade slowly advanced ; and the journey ever and anon beguiled -with tabret 
 and pipe. Only -when the pilgrims had thus got a-way from the first 
 cro-\^'d, would it be possible for each group to know if all its members 
 were safe. 
 
 Among many others, some one of whose family had for the time been 
 separated from them in the confusion, were Joseph and Mary. On reach- 
 ing their first night's encampment they discovered that the boy Jesus was 
 not in the caravan. He had likely been missed earlier, but He might be 
 with friends in some other part of the crowd. After seeking diligently 
 for Him, however, without success, they were greatly alarmed. Amidst 
 such vast multitudes He might be lost to them for ever. 
 
 Kotliing was left but to return to Jerusalem, which they re-entered on 
 the evening of the second day. But they could learn nothing of Him till 
 the day after, when, at last, they found Him in one of the schools of the 
 Rabbis, held in the Temple courts. 
 
 These schools were a characteristic of the times. They were open, and 
 any one entering might answer or propose a question. The Rabbi sat on 
 a high seat ; his scholars on the ground, at his feet, in half-circles : their 
 one study the Law, with its Rabbinical comments. 
 
 In the school in which Jesus was found, a number of Rabbis were pre- 
 sent, perhaps because it was the Passover season. The gentle Hillel — the 
 Looser— was perhaps still alive, and may possibly have been among them. 
 The harsh and strict Shammai — the Binder — his old rival, had been long 
 dead. Hillel's son, Rabban Simeon, and even his greater grandson, 
 Gamaliel, the futiu-e teacher of St. Paul, may have been of the number, 
 though Gamaliel would, then, like Jesus, be only a bo3^ Hanan, or Annas, 
 son of Seth, had been just appointed high priest, but did not likely see 
 Him, as a boy. whom he was afterwards to crucify. Apart from the bitter 
 hostility between the priests and the Rabbis, he would be too busy with his 
 monopoly of doves for the Temple, to care for tlie discussions of the 
 schools, for he owned the shops for doves on Mount Olivet, and sold them 
 for a piece of gold, though the Law had chosen them as offerings suited 
 for the poorest from their commonness and cheapness. 
 
 Among the famous men, then, apparently, living in Jerusalem, was 
 Rabbi Jochanan Ben Zacchai, afterwards rej^uted a prophet, from hig 
 once crying out — when the Temple gate opened of itself — " Temple, 
 Temple, why do you frighten us ? "VVe know that thou will shortly be 
 destroyed, for it says — ' Open, Lebanon, thy gates, and let fire devour 
 thy cedars.'" Jonathan Ben Uzziel, the Targumist, revered by his nation ; 
 Rabbi Ben Buta, who, though of Shammai's school, was almost as mild as 
 Hillel, and, like him, had a great reputation for Rabbinical sanctity ; now 
 blind these many years, for Herod had put out his eyes ; Dosithai of 
 Jethma, a zealous opponent of Herod ; Zadok, who had taken part in the 
 
 L
 
 146 THE LIFE OF CIIEIST. 
 
 rising of Judas the Gaiilonite ; Boctlios, father of one of Herod's wives— 
 the second Mariamne - once high priest, and now the head of the courtly 
 Herodian and Eoman party ; Mcodemus, who afterwards came to Jesus 
 by night, and the rich Joseph of Arimathea,— in a grave given by whom 
 Jesus was afterwards to lie, were all apparently, then alive. But we can 
 only conjecture in whose presence Jesus sat, for dates are sadly wanting. 
 One picture alone survives in Scripture, of Hebrew boyhood in its noblest 
 beauty— that of David, with his lustrous eyes, auburn hair, and lovely 
 features. It is no great stretch of fancy to believe that He who was at 
 once David's heir and his lord— the Son of David in a sense higher than 
 man had dreamed — realized the name not less in His personal beauty than 
 in other respects. The passion of His soul— to learn more of His Father's 
 business— had led Him naturally to the famed schools in His Father's 
 house, where the wisest and most learned of His nation made the holy 
 books, in which that Father's will was revealed, their lifelong study. The 
 mystery of His own nature and of His relations to His Father in Heaven 
 was dawning on Him more and more. His mother's words, from time to 
 time, had daily a deeper and more wondrous significance, and His sinless 
 spirit lived in ever growing communion with unseen and eternal realities. 
 He had naturally, therefore, sought those who could open for Him the 
 fountains of Heavenly wisdom for which His whole being panted, and was 
 the keenest listener, and the most eager in His questions, of all the group 
 seated at their feet. The days would come when no further growth was 
 possible, and then He would sit in the courts of the same Temple, as a 
 teacher who needed no human help. As yet, however. He could not honour 
 His Father more than by seeking, as a child, to know His holy Word from 
 its accredited expounders. Enthusiasm so pure and lofty in one so young, 
 lighting up the beauty of such eyes and features, may well have filled the 
 heart of the gravest Eabbi with wonder and delight. 
 
 In this school of the Rabbis Mary and Joseph found Him, sitting on the 
 ground, with others, at the feet of the half-circle of " doctors," His whole 
 soul so absorbed in the Law and the Prophets that He had forgotten all 
 other thoughts : His family circle — the flight of time. It was no wonder 
 to find Him in such a place, for as " a Son of the Law " it was only what a 
 Jew exi^ected, but it might well amaze them that He had been so engrossed 
 with such matters as to be still there, after the feast was over, and not only 
 Mary and Joseph, but the great throng of pilgrims, had left for home. 
 As befitted her higher relationship, and with the greater zeal natural to a 
 mother's love in such a case, she, not Joseph, spoke. " Son," said she, 
 "why hast Thou thus dealt with us? Behold, Thy father and I have 
 sought Thee sorrowing." It seemed so strange that one so gentle, docile, 
 and loving, who had never given them an anxious thought by any childish 
 frowardness, should cause them such pain and alarm. The answer, gentle 
 and lofty, must have fallen on Mary's heart as a soft rebuke, though she 
 could not understand its fulness of meaning : " How is it that ye sought 
 Me ? There was no place where I could so surely be as in My Father's 
 house — there were no matters which could so rightfully fill My thoughts 
 as His p " Her Son was outgrowing His childhood : the light of a higher
 
 EARLY YEARS. 147 
 
 world was breaking in on His soul ; the claims of tlio home of Nazareth 
 were fading before others infinitely greater and holier. 
 
 A sinless childhood had made the past a long dream of i^cace and love 
 in the home at Nazareth, and this only deepened as the simplicity of early 
 years passed into the ripeness of a perfect manhood. Though He must 
 have felt the growing distance between Himself and Joseph, or even 
 Mary; their weakness and His own strength; their simplicity and His 
 own wisdom; their frail humanity, touched by daily sin, and His own 
 pure and sinless nature, He remained subject to them, as if only like 
 others. If ever there was a son who might have been expected to claim 
 independence it was He, and yet, to sanctify and enforce filial obedience 
 for ever, He lived on, under their humble roof, exemplary in the imiDlicit 
 and far-reaching obedience of a Jewish youth to his parents. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 EAELY TEAUS. 
 
 XpOH nearly eighteen years^ after the Passover visit to Jerusalem, a 
 -°~ deep obscurity rests over the life of Jesus. Like Plis cousin John, 
 or the sheioherd Moses, or the youthful David, He came before the world 
 at last, only after a long and humble seclusion. The qniet valley and hills 
 of Nazareth saw Him gradually ripen into youth and manhood — as son, 
 brother, citizen, neighbour, friend — like others. There was no sudden or 
 miraculous disclosure of His Divine greatness. Like the grain in the 
 fields beneath His early home. His growth was imperceptible. The white, 
 flat-roofed houses of to-day are, doubtless, much the same as those amidst 
 which He played as a child, and lived as a man ; vines shading the walls ; 
 doves sunning themselves on the flat roofs ; the arrangements, within, as 
 simple, as they are unpretending, without. A few mats on the floor, a 
 built seat running along the wall, spread with some modest cushions and 
 the bright quilts on which the inmates sleep at night, and serving by day 
 as shelf for the few dishes in common nse ; a painted chest in the corner ; 
 some large clay water jars, their mouths filled, perhaps, with sweet herbs, 
 to keep the contents cool and fresh ; the only light that entering by the 
 open door ; a low, round, painted, wooden stool, brought, at meals, into 
 the middle of the room, to hold the tray and dish, round which the house- 
 hold sit, with crossed knees, on mats — supply the picture of a house at 
 Nazareth of the humbler t^'pe. It may be that difi'crences in details were 
 found in early times, for many of the houses of ancient Chorazin are yet 
 tolerably perfect, and show some variations from present dwellings. 
 Generally square, they ranged downwards in size, from about 30 feet each 
 way, and had one or two columns in the centre, to support the flat roof. 
 The walls, which are still, in some cases, six feet high, and about two feet 
 thick, were built of masonry or of loose blocks of basalt, Chorazin being 
 on the volcanic edge of the Sea of Galilee, and not, like Nazareth, on lime- 
 stone hills. A low doorway opened in the centre of one of the walls, and
 
 148 THE LIFE OF CIIIIIST. 
 
 each house had windows a foot high and about six inches broad. But, 
 like the houses of to-day, most had only one chamber, though some were 
 divided into four. 
 
 In the shelter of some such home, in one of the narrow, stony streets of 
 Nazareth, Jesus grew up. On the hillsides, in the little crossways between 
 the houses, in the rude gardens, in the fields below the town, beside the 
 bounteous fountain outside the houses, near the road, from which the 
 village mothers and daughters still bear the watqr for their households — 
 He was a child among other children. As He grew, year by year. His 
 great eyes would shine with a spiritual brightness, and His mind would 
 be filled with strange loneliness that woidd separate Him from most. He 
 must, inevitably, have, early, seemed as if raised above everything earthly, 
 and no imiiure word or thought would appear befitting in His presence. 
 As a growing lad. He would already feel the isolation which, in His later 
 years, became so extreme, for how could sinlcssness be at home with sin 
 and weakness ? He would seek the society of the elders rather than of 
 the young, and, while devoted to Joseph, would be altogether so to His 
 mother. The habits of His later life let us imagine that, even in His 
 youth, He often withdrew to the loneliest retreats in the mountains and 
 valleys round, and we may fancy that Mary, knowing His ways, would 
 cease, after a time, to wonder where He was. One height, we may be sure, 
 was often visited : the mountain-top above the village, from which His eye 
 could wander over the wondrous landscape. 
 
 The Passover, though the greatest religious solemnity of the year, was 
 only one in a continually recurring series. Four times each year, in July, 
 October, January, and March, different events in the national history 
 would be more or less strictly observed in the Jewish community at 
 Nazareth. Special fasts were, moreover, ordered, from time to time, in 
 seasons of public danger or distress. Thene days, set a2:)art for repentance 
 and prayer, excited a general and deep religious feeling. At all times 
 striking, they sometimes, in exceptional cases, were singularly impressive. 
 On special public humiliations all the people covered themselves with sack- 
 cloth, and strewed ashes on their heads, as they stood Ijefore the Reader's 
 desk, brought from the synagogue into some ojDcn place, and similarly 
 draped in mourning. Jesus must have seen this, and how ashes were put 
 on the heads of the local judges and rulers of the synagogue, on such a 
 day, and He must have listened to the Eabbi calling on all present to re- 
 pent, and to the prayers and penitential psalms which followed, and to the 
 trumpets wailing at the close of each. He may have gone with Joseph 
 and all the congregation, when the service ended, to the burial-place of 
 the village to lambent. 
 
 But such sadness was by no means the characteristic of the national reli- 
 gion. Fifty days after the Passover, multitudes were once more in motion to- 
 wards Jerusalem, to attend the Feast of Weeks, or First-Fruits. The vast 
 numbers present at it are recorded in the second chapter of the Acts. It 
 was one of the three great festivities of the year, and there can be little 
 doubt that in His Nazareth life Jesus and the household of Joseph, as a 
 whole, took part in so great and universal a rejoicing.
 
 EARLY YEAES. 149 
 
 The intending pilgrims in Nazareth and the district round met in the 
 town, as a convenient centre, to arrange for the journey. As before the 
 Passover, liowever, no one slept in any house immediately before startino-, 
 all going out into the open country and sleeping in the open air, lest a 
 death might happen where they lodged, and defile them, so that they 
 could not keep the feast. They had to be in Jerusalem before the 6th of 
 Siwan (June), on which and the 7th the feast was held, and, therefore, set 
 off some days before. The early harvest was mostly over, so that many 
 could go. Wives, unmarried sisters, and children accompanied not a few. 
 Flocks of sheep and oxen, for sacrifice and feasting, were driven gently 
 along with the bands of pilgrims, and strings of asses and camels, laden 
 with provisions and simple necessaries, or with free-will gifts to the Temple, 
 or bearing the old or feeble, lengthened the train. Every one wore festal 
 clothes, and not a few carried garlands and wreaths of flowers. The cool 
 banks of streams, or some well, offered resting-places by the way, and the 
 pure water, with melons, dates, or cucumbers, sufficed for their simple 
 food. Different bands united as they passed fresh towns and villages. 
 All were roused, each morning, with the cry, " Else, let us go up to Zion, 
 to the Eternal, our God ! " The offerings of first-fruits — the choicest of 
 the year — in baskets of willows, or even of gold or silver ; doves for burnt 
 offerings, with their wings bound, and the ox, intended for a peace offering, 
 — its horns gilded, and bound with wreaths of olive, — went first. Flutes 
 forthwith struck ujo, and the cavalcade moved on, to the chant, " I was glad 
 when they said to me, We shall go into the house of the Lord." Similar 
 hymns cheered them ever and anon on each day's march. When within 
 sight of Jerusalem, all was enthusiasm. Many threw themselves on their 
 knees in devotion, lifting their hands to heaven. Presently all burst into 
 the grand ode, " Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth is 
 Mount Zion, on the sides of the North, the city of the great King" — the 
 excitement culminating in the climax — " For this God is our God for ever 
 and ever ; He will be our guide even unto death." A halt was now made 
 to get everything in order. All arrayed themselves to the best advantage. 
 The wheatsheaves were wreathed with lilies and the first-fruits bedded in 
 flowers, and set out as effectively as possible. Each company unrolled its 
 banner, bearing the name of the town or village from which it came. 
 When near the citj^ priests in their white robes came out to meet them, 
 accompanied by a throng of citizens in holiday dress ; and as they entered 
 the gates they sang aloud to the accompaniment of flutes, the Psalm, " I 
 was glad when they said to me. Let us go into .the house of the Lord. Our 
 feet shall stand within thy gates, Jerusalem." The workmen at their 
 trades in the streets, or at their doors, rose in honour of the i)rocession as 
 it passed, with the greeting, " Men of Nazareth (or elsewhere), welcome ! " 
 a great crowd as they advanced, filling the air with gladness. At the 
 Temple hill, every one, rich and poor — for all shared in these processions 
 — took his basket on his shoulder and ascended to the Court of Men, 
 where the Levites met them, and fell into the procession, singing, to the 
 sound of their instruments, the Psalm, beginning, " Hallelujah ! Praise 
 God in His sanctuary ; praise Him in the firmament of His power." " I
 
 150 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 thank Thee, Lord, for Thou hast hoard me, and hast not let mine enemies 
 rejoice over me." The doves hanging from the baskets were now handed 
 to the priests for burnt offerings, and the first-fruits and gifts delivered, 
 with the words prescribed by Moses, " I profess this day unto the Lord 
 thy God that I am come into the country which the Lord sware to our 
 fathers to give us. And now, behold, I have brought the first-fruits of the 
 land, which Thou, Lord, hast given me." The pilgrims then left the 
 Temple, followed by the great throng, some to lodge with relations and 
 friends, others with some of the many hosts inviting them. 
 
 There can be little doubt that Jesus was .more than once a spectator of 
 such rejoicings, and often in His earlier years saw the vast encampments 
 of pilgrims from every part, round the city : the tents spread on each house- 
 top to lodge the overflowing visitors ; the windows and doors decked with 
 branches of trees, and garlands and festoons of flowers, the streets flutter- 
 ing with banners wreathed with roses and lilies, and filled with gay throngs. 
 
 In the month of August another festivity drew many from Nazareth to 
 Jerusalem. In the middle of that month the wood for the Temple, which 
 all Jews had to contribute, was taken to the capital with great rejoicings. 
 The 1st of October, which was celebrated as I^ew Year's Day, or the Feast 
 of Trumpets, was the nest event in the religious calendar of the months. 
 As the day of the first new moon of the year, it was ushered in, over the 
 land, by a blast of trumpets, and special sacrifices were offered in Jeru- 
 salem. ISTo work was done. It was the day, in the eyes of the Jew, on 
 which an accoimt was taken by God of the acts of the past year ; the day of 
 judgment, on which the destiny of every one for the coming year was 
 written in the Heavenly books. It was a fast, therefore, rather than a 
 festival. The synagogues were visited earlier thaii usual for a week before 
 it ; special prayers were offered, and no one ate till mid-day or even till 
 sunset. In the synagogue of Nazareth, as elsewhere, its eve was like that 
 of a Sabbath. It must have been a great event in a household like that of 
 Joseph. 
 
 The eight days that followed were the Jewish Lent, in prejoaratlon for 
 the Day of Atonement, a time so solemn and sacred that it was known as 
 THE BAY. It was a Sabbath of Sabbaths : a day of entire rest. The entire 
 people fasted during the twenty-four hours. Worldly and household affairs 
 were neglected ; no one even bathed. The whole day was spent in the 
 synagogue, where each stood wi'apped in the white shroud, and wearing 
 the white cap, in which he was hereafter to be buried. As was befitting, 
 all disputes between friends and neighbours were required to be settled 
 before it besan. Each made a formal confession of his sins before God, in 
 words duly prescribed. It was the most solemn day of the Jewish year. 
 
 In the Temple the high priest alone officiated. Jesus would early hear 
 how, for seven days before, he had gone through daily rehearsals of every 
 rite, for fear of his introducing Sadducean innovations, and had been 
 cleansed by sprinklings of holy water. He would hear how the night 
 before the great day was spent in reading to him, or hearing him read 
 aloud, to keep him awake, for he must not sleep till after next sunset. 
 How must He have felt the puerility of Kabbinism when He learned that
 
 EARLY YEARS. 151 
 
 the supreme pontiff of the nation had to change his dress, on the gi-eat day, 
 sis times, to wash his hands and feet eight times, and to bathe his Avhole 
 body five times, between dawn and sunset ! The high priest entered the 
 Holy of Holies fo ur tim es, to offer incense, to pray, to sprinkle the blood of 
 a goat towards the mercy seat ; and, at the close, to bring out the censer. 
 Jesus must often have seen him, clad in white, his golden robes laid aside, 
 with bare feet and covered head, drawing aside the veil, and passing alone 
 into the awful darkness which no one but he ever invaded, and he only on 
 this one day of the year. Eites so countless and intricate that even the 
 historian of Judaism will not attempt to recount them : the services of 
 hundreds of priests, the whole culminating in a threefold confession of sin 
 for the nation : the utterance ten times of the mysterious name of God, and 
 the formal absolution of Israel with the sprinkling of blood : the vast con- 
 gregation of worshippers prostrating themselves on the earth three times, 
 with the cry, " Blessed be His glorious name for ever," at each utterance 
 of the awful name, the high priest responding after each shout, " Ye are 
 clean ! " were all seen and watched, again and again, by the future 
 Saviour. 
 
 These high solemnities over, the day ended in a reaction natural to the 
 Bast. No sooner had the exhausted high priest left the Temple, accom- 
 panied by throngs, to congratulate him on his safety, than a religious feast 
 began at Jerusalem, and, we may be sure, over all the land. The gardens 
 below Mount Zion, and round the walls, were gay with the maidens of the 
 city, dressed in white, gone to meet the youths, who were to choose their 
 future wives, that evening, from among them. 
 
 Five days later came the closing great feast of the year — that of Taber- 
 nacles, with its rejoicings — one of the three great annual festivals at which 
 every Israelite was required, if possible, to make a jom^ney to Jerusalem. 
 It celebrated the Forty Years' Wandering in tents, but it was also the 
 great harvest thanksgiving for the fruits of the year, now fully gathered. 
 Like others, Jesus, doubtless, often lived for the week, at least by day, in 
 booths of living twigs, which rose in every court, on every roof, and in the 
 streets and open places of Jerusalem,— and watched the crowds bearing 
 offerings of the best of their fruit to the Temple : each carrying a palm or 
 citron branch as a sign of joy. The merry feasting in every house : the 
 illuminated city : the universal joy, were familiar to Him. 
 
 Tlic 25th of Kislew — our December — commemorated the re-opening of 
 the Temple by Judas Maccabasus, after its profanation by the Syrians. It 
 brought another week of universal rejoicings. All through the land the 
 people assembled in their synagogues, carrying branches of palm and 
 other trees in their hands, and held jubilant services. No fast or mourn- 
 ing could commence during the feast, and a blaze of lamps, lanterns, and 
 torches illuminated every house, within and without, each evening. In 
 Jerusalem the Temple itself was thus lighted up. The young of every 
 household heard the stirring deeds of the Maccabees, to rouse them to 
 noble emulation, and with these were linked the story of the heroic Judith 
 and the Assyrian Holofernes. There was no child in Nazareth that did 
 not know them.
 
 152 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 The Feast of Piirim brightened the interval between that of Tabernacles 
 and the Tassover. It was held on the llth and 15th Adar — jiart of our 
 February and March — to embody the national joy at the deliverance, by 
 Esther, of their forefathers in Persia, from the designs of Haman. The 
 whole book of Esther was read at the synagogue service of the evening 
 before, to keei3 the memory of the great event alive ; the children raising 
 their loudest and angriest cries at every mention of the name of Haman ; 
 the congregation stamping on the floor, with Eastern demonstrativeness, 
 and imprecating, from every voice, the curse, " Let his name be blotted 
 out. The name of the wicked shall rot." Year by year, in the Nazareth 
 synagogue, Jesus must have seen and heard all this, and how the Eeader 
 tried to read in one breath, the verses in which Haman and his sons are 
 jointly mentioned, to show that they were hanged together. 
 
 Such was the Jewish religious year, with its fifty -nine feast days and its 
 background of fastings, as it jiassed before the eyes of Jesus. Each incident 
 had its special religious colouring, and the aggregate influence, constantly 
 recurring, impressed itself in a thousand ways, on the national Janguage, 
 thoughts, and life. Religion and politics, moreover, are identical in a 
 theocracy, and thus the two principles which most powerfully move man- 
 kind constantly agitated every breast. In such an atmosjihcre Christ 
 sjoent His whole earthly life. 
 
 But neither the synagogue services, nor the feasts at Jerusalem, which 
 the Galilcean delighted to attend, were the supreme influences, humanly 
 speaking, in the growth of Jesus in " wisdom." Like the teaching of the 
 Eabbis, they were only so many aids to the understanding of that sacred 
 book, in which His heavenly Father had revealed Himself to Israel. The 
 Gospels show, in every page, that, like Timothy, Jesus, from a child, knew 
 " theJEol^ Scriptures." In such a household as that of Joseph, we may be 
 sure that they were in daily use, for there, if anywhere, the Rabbinical rule 
 would be strictly observed, that " three who eat together without talking 
 of the Law, are as if they were eating (heathen) sacrifices." (The directness, 
 joy, and naturalness of Christ's religion speak of the unconstrained and 
 holy influences around Him in early years. A wise and tender guidance 
 in the things of God, leading the way to heaven, as well as pointing it out, 
 must have marked both Mary and Joseph. The fond pictures of home 
 and childhood in the Gospels, speak of i^ersonal recollections. The allu- 
 sions to the innocent playing of children ; to their being nearest the King- 
 dom of Heaven ; the picture of a father powerless against his child's 
 entreaty ; and that touching outburst at His own homelessness, compared 
 even with the birds and tlie foxes, show how Christ's mind went back, 
 through life, to the pure and happy memories of Nazareth. 
 
 Maiy and Josejoh, we can scarcely doubt, were, themselves, the earliest 
 teachers of Jesus, At their knees He must have first learned to read the 
 Scriptures. Pious Jewish parents took especial care to have a manuscript 
 of the Law, in the old Hebrew characters, as their especial domestic 
 treasure. Even so early as the Asmonean kings, such rolls were so 
 common in jarivate houses, that the fury of the Syrian king, who wished to 
 introduce the Greek customs and religion, was especially directed against
 
 EAELY YEAES. 153 
 
 them. In Josejoh's day, the Supreme influence of the Rabbis and Phari- 
 sees must liave deepened into a passion the desire to possess such a symbol 
 of loyahy to the faith of Israel. Richer families would have a comiolete 
 copy of the Old Testament, on parchment, or on Egy]Dtian papyi'us ; 
 humbler homes would boast a copy of the Law, or a Psalter, and all, alike, 
 gloried in the verses on their door-posts and in their phjdacteries. Chil- 
 dren had small rolls, containing the Sch'ma, or the Hallel, or the history 
 of Creation to the flood, or the first eight chapters of Leviticus. 
 
 From the modest but priceless instructions of home, Jesus would, 
 doubtless, pass to the school in the synagogue, where He would learn more 
 of the Law, and be taught to write, or rather, to jarint, — for His writing 
 would be in the old Hebrew characters — the only ones then in use. 
 
 His deep knowledge of the Scriptures shows' itself throughout the 
 Gospels. He has a quotation ready to meet every hostile question. It 
 was so profound that it forced even His enemies to recognise Him as a 
 Rabbi. His frequent retort on the Rabbis themselves — "Have ye not 
 read ? " and the deep insight into the spirit of Scripture, which opposes to 
 rubrics and forms the quickening power of a higher life, 2:)rove how in- 
 tensely He must have studied the sacred books, and that the zeal that 
 drew Him, in His boyhood, to the Temple school at Jerusalem, to hear 
 them exjilained, was the sacred passion of His life. In the Gospels we 
 find two quotations from Genesis, two from Exodus, one from Numbers, 
 two from Deuteronomy, seven from the Psalms, five from Isaiah, one from 
 Hosea^ one from Jonah, two from Malachi, two from Daniel, one from 
 Micah, and one from Zechariah, respectively. The whole of the Old Testa- 
 ment was as familiar to Him as the Magnificat shows it to have been to 
 His mother, Mary. It was from the clear fountain of the ancient oracles 
 His childhood drank in the wisdom that cometh from above. They had 
 been His only school-book, and they were the unwearying joy of His whole 
 life. From them He taught the higher spiritual worship which contrasted 
 so strongly with the worship of the letter. It was to them He appealed 
 when He rejected what was worthless and trifling in the religious teaching 
 of His day. 
 
 The long years of retired and humble life in Nazareth were passed in no 
 ignoble idleness and dependence. The people of the town knew Jesus as, 
 like Joseph, a carpenter, labouring for His daily bread at the occui^ations 
 which offered themselves in His calling. Study and handiwork were 
 familiarly associated in the Jewish mind, and carried with them no such 
 ideas of incompatibility as with us. " Love handiwork," said Shemaia, a 
 teacher of Hillel, and it was a proverbial saying in the family of Gamaliel, 
 that to unite the study of the Law with a trade kept away sin, whereas 
 study alone was dangerous and disappointing. Rabbis who gave a third 
 of the day to study, a third to prayer, and a third to labour, are mentioned 
 with special honour. Stories were fondly told of famous teachers carrying 
 their work-stools to their schools, and how Rabbi Phinehas was working 
 as a mason when chosen as high-priest. Of the Rabbis in honour in 
 Christ's day or later, some were millers, others carpenters, cobblers, tailors, 
 bakers, surgeons, builders, surveyors, money-changers, scribes, carriers.
 
 15-1 TIIE LIFE OF OIIRIST. 
 
 smkhs, and evoii sextons. lu a nation Avhorc uo toacliov conlil receive 
 payment foi* Ins instructions tlic honest industry wlucli gained self-support 
 brought no false sliaiuo. 
 
 The years at Nazareth must have been diligently used in the observation 
 of the_great_bpok of nature, and of man, as aycII as of written revelation. 
 The Gospels sIiott, throughout, that nothing escaped the ej'^e of Jesus. 
 The lilies and the grass of the field, as lie paints them in the Sermon on 
 the j\rouut : the hen, as it gathers its young, in its mother's love, under its 
 widespread Avings; tlie birds of the air, as they eat and driivlc, Avithout 
 cnro, from the bounty avonnd them ; the lambs which run to follow the 
 shepherd, but sometimes go astray and are lost in the wilderness ; the 
 dogs so familiar in Eastern cities ; the foxes that make their holes in the 
 thickets ; the silent plants and llowors, the humble life of the creatm-es of 
 the woods, the air, the fold, and the street, were all, alike, noticed in these 
 early years of preiiaration. Nor was man neglected. The sports of child- 
 hood; the rejoicings of riper life; the bride and the bridegroom; the 
 mourner and the dead ; the castles and palaces of princes, and the silken 
 robes of the great ; the rich owners of field and vincj^ard ; the steward, 
 the travelling merchant, the beggar, the debtor ; the toil of the sower and 
 of the labourer in the vinej^ard, or of the fisher on the lake; the sweat of 
 the worker ; the sighs of those in chains, or in the dungeon, were seen, and 
 heard, and remembered. Nor did He rest merely in sujoerficial observation. 
 The possessions, joj^s, and sufferings of men, their words and acts, their 
 customs, their pride or humility, pretence or sincerity, failings or merits, 
 were treasured as materials from Avhich, one day, to paint them to them- 
 selves. He had, moreover, the same keen eye to note the good in those 
 round Him as their unworthy striving and planning, their avarice, ambi- 
 tion, passion, or sellishness. It is, indeed, the noblest characteristic in this 
 constant keen-siglitedness, that amidst all the imperfections and faults 
 prerailing, He never failed to evoke the hidden good which He often saw 
 even in the most hopeless. 
 
 Publicans and sinners were not rejected. Even in them He discovered 
 a better self. In Zacchens He sees a son of Abraham ; in Mary Mag- 
 dalene He gains a w'ceping penitent, and in the dj-ing robber He welcomes 
 back a returning prodigal. Nor was it mere intellectual penetration that 
 thus laid bare the secrets of every heart. His search of the bosom is per- 
 vaded throughout with the breath of the warmest love. As the brother 
 and friend of all, who has come to seek and to save that which was lost, 
 He looks at men with ej'es of infinite pity, whatever their race. 
 
 The life of Nazareth, in its quiet and obscurity, is passed over in a few 
 lines by the Evangelists; but in the counsels of God it had its full aud 
 all-wise ptu'pose, from first to last, as a prejiaration for the great work of 
 the closing years of our Lord's life. We cannot conceive of Him otherwise 
 than as furnished from His first appearance in the world with all that was 
 needful in its Saviour: as the incarnation of the divine Word, thouirh for 
 a time silent; the Light which should shine in darkness, though still, for 
 a time, concealed. He must have been marked out from all around Him 
 by His higher spiritual nature, and separated by it from all fellowship
 
 LIFE TNDEE THE LAW. l5o 
 
 with evil. Yet, in His human nature, there must have been the same 
 gradual dovelopmc-nt as in other men ; such a development as, by its even 
 and steadfast advance, made His life apparently in nothing different from 
 that of His fellow townsmen, else they would not have felt the wonder at 
 Him which they afterwards evinced. The laws and processes of ordinary 
 human life must have been left to mould and form His manhood— the 
 same habits of inquiry; the same need of the collision of mind with mind; 
 of patience during long expectation ; of reconciliation to home duties and 
 daily self-denials; of calm strength that leans only upon God. He must 
 have looked out on the world of men from the calm retreat of those years 
 as He, doubtless, often did on the matchless landscape from the hill above 
 the village. The strength and weakness of the systems of the day ; the 
 lights and shadows of the human world, would be watched and noted with 
 never-tiring survey, as were the hills and valleys, the clouds and sunshine 
 of the scene around. Year after year passed, and still found Him at His 
 daily toil, because His hour was not yet come. In gentle patience, in 
 transparent blamelessness of life ; in natural and ever-active goodness ; in 
 tender love and rc-ady favour to all around; loved, honoured, but half 
 veiled in the mysterious light of perfect manhood and kindling divinity, 
 thirty years passed quietly away. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 LIFE UNDEK THE LAW. 
 
 BESIDES the humbler schools of the towns and villages, there were 
 others in Jerusalem, and in some of the larger centres of population, 
 in the days of Christ, in which a higher education was given by the Kabbis 
 — tlie learned class of the nation. There was notliing, however, to attract 
 Jesus to such schools, though He had been so eager in His attendance 
 during His first brief visit to Jerusalem. It may be that even so short a 
 trial v/as enough to show Ilim how little could be gained from them. 
 
 The wonderful revival of Judaism under Ezra and his associates had 
 had the most lasting effect on the nation. An order known, indifferently, 
 as " Scribes," " Teachers of the Law," or " Rabbis," gradually rose, who 
 devoted themselves to the study of the Law exclusively, and became the 
 recognised authorities in all matters connected with it. It had been a 
 command of the Great Synagogue that those who were learned in the Law 
 should zealously teach it to younger men, and, thus, schools rose erelong 
 in which famous Rabbis gathered large numbers of students. Tlie supreme 
 distinction accorded to the Rabbi in society at large, in which he was by 
 far the foremost personage : the exaggerated reverence claimed for his 
 office by his order itself, and sanctioned by the superstitious homage of 
 the people; the constant necessity for reference to its members, under a 
 religion which prescribed rules for every detail of social or private life, 
 and, not least, the fact that the dignity of a Raljbi was open to the 
 humblest who acquired the necessary learning, made the schools very
 
 156 THE LIFE OF CHIIIST. 
 
 popular. As the son of a peasant, in the middle ages, if he entered the 
 Church, might rise above the haughtiest noble, the son of a Jewish villager 
 might rise above even the high priest, by becoming a Eabbi. It was, 
 doubtless, remembered, in Christ's day, that some sixty years before, when 
 the high priest had been returning from the Temple after the service of 
 the Day of Atonement, attended, according to custom, by a crowd, to 
 congratulate him on his having come safely from the terrors of the Awful 
 Presence, and to escort him to his dwelling — two Eabbis having chanced 
 to pass by, the people left the high priest, greatly to his indignation, and 
 paid reverence, instead, to the Teachers of the Law. The most abject 
 prostration of intellect and soul before any priesthood never sin-passed 
 that of the Jew before the Eabbi. 
 
 From their scholars the Eabbis demanded the most profound reverence. 
 " The honour," says the Talmud, " due to a teacher borders on that due to 
 God." If a choice were necessary between one's father and a Eabbi, the 
 Eabbi must have the preference. A father has only brought him into the 
 world, but the Eabbi, who teaches him wisdom, brings him to the life 
 hereafter. If one's father and a Eabbi be carrying burdens, the Ijurden of 
 the Eabbi must be carried for him, and not that of the father. If one's 
 father and a Eabbi be both in prison, the Eabbi must first be redeemed, 
 and only then, the father. The common discourse of a Eabbi was to be 
 reverenced as much as the Law. To dispute with one, or murmur against 
 liim, was a crime as great as to do the same towards the Almighty. Their 
 words mxTst be received as words of the living God. As in the blind 
 passive obedience required fi-om the Jesuits, a scholar of the Eabbis was 
 required to accejit what his master taught, if he said that the left hand 
 was the right. A scholar who did not rise uji before his Eabbi could not 
 hope to live long, because " he feareth not before God." It was a principle 
 nniversally accepted that " the sayings of the Scribes were weightier than 
 those of the Law." 
 
 The transmission of the as yet unwritten ojainions of former Eabbis — 
 forming an ever-growing mass of tradition — was the special aim of the 
 Eabbis of each ago. In the course of centuries many of the Mosaic laws 
 had became inapplicable to the altered state of things, and as their literal 
 observance had become impossible, new prescriptions began to be invented, 
 after the Eeturn, to perpetuate their spirit. Many were virtually obso- 
 lete : others required careful exposition by the Eabbis. The comments 
 thus delivered formed, as time rolled on, a great body of unwritten law, 
 which claimed equal authority with the law of Moses, and was necessarily 
 known in any full degree only by the professional Eabbis, who devoted 
 their lives to its study. It might be increased, but could never be altered 
 or superseded in any particular. Once uttered, a Eabbi's words remained 
 law for ever, though they might be explained away and virtually ignored, 
 while affected to be followed. 
 
 Uniformity of belief and ritual practice was the one grand design of the 
 founders of Judaism ; the moulding the whole religious life of the nation 
 to such a machine-like discipline as would make any variation from the 
 customs of the past well-nigh impossible. A universal, death-like con-
 
 LIFE UNDER THE LAW. 157 
 
 scrvaHom, pcrmitLing no change in snccessive ages, was established, as 
 the grand secnrity for a separate national existence, by its isolating the 
 Jew from all other races, and keeping him for ever apart. For this end, 
 not only was that part of the Law which concerned the common life of the 
 people— their Sabbaths, feast days, jubilees, offerings, sacrifices, tithes, the 
 Temple and Synagogue worship, civil and criminal law, mai'riage, and the 
 like — explained, commented on, and minutely ordered by the Eabbis, but 
 also that portion of it which related only to the private duties of individuals 
 in their daily religious life. Their food, their clothes, their journeys, their 
 occupations : indeed, every act of their lives, and almost their every 
 thought, were brought under Eabbinical rules. To perj^etuate the Law, a 
 "hedge" of outlying commands was set round it, which, in Christ's day, 
 had become so " heavy and grievous a burden," that even the Talmud 
 denounces it as a vexatious oppression. So vast had the accumulation of 
 precepts become, by an endless series of refined deductions from the Scrip- 
 tures — often connected with them only by a very thin thread at best — that 
 the Eabbis themselves have comj^ared their laws on the proper keeping of 
 the Sabbath to a mountain which hangs on a hair. 
 
 In the later Grecian age, when heathen culture was patronized by the 
 Sadducean high priests, and foreign customs were in increasing favour with 
 the people, the Eabbis, who were the zealots or puritans of Judaism, 
 sought to stem the flood of corruption, by enforcing increased strictness in 
 the observance of the multitudinous precepts they had already established. 
 From that time unconditional obedience was required to every Eabbinical 
 law. 
 
 A system which admitted no change : in which the least originality of 
 thought was heresy : which required the mechanical labour of a lifetime to 
 master its details, and which occupied its teachers with the most trifling 
 casuistry, could have only one result — to degenerate, to a great extent, into 
 puerilities and outward forms. 
 
 It would be wearisome and uninteresting to quote, at any great length, 
 illustrations of the working of such a scheme of ecclesiastical tyranny, in 
 daily life, but an example or two will show the system to which Jesus 
 opposed the freedom of a spiritual religion. It is difficult to realize the 
 condition of a people who had submitted to such mental and bodily 
 bondage. 
 
 One of the great questions discussed by the Eabbis was ceremonial 
 purity and defilement, a subject so wide that it gave rise to countless rules. 
 Uncleanness could be contracted in many waj-s ; among others, by the 
 vessels used in eating, and hence it was a vital matter to know what might 
 be used, and what must be avoided. In hollow dishes of clay or pottery, 
 the inside and bottom contracted and caused uncleanness, but not the out- 
 side, and they could only be cleansed by breaking. The pieces, however, 
 might still defile, and hence it was keenly discussed how small the frag- 
 ments must be to ensure safety. If a dish or vessel had contained a log of 
 oil, a fragment could still defile that held as much oil as would anoint the 
 great toe ; if it had held from a log to a seah, the fragment, to be danger- 
 ous, must hold the fourth of a log ; if it had held from two or three seahs
 
 158 THE LIFE 01^ CHBIST. 
 
 to five, a piece of it could defile if it lield a log. As, however, hollow 
 earthen vessels contracted !uncleanness on\y on the inside, not on the out, 
 some could not become unclean — as, for instance, a flat plate without a 
 rim, an open coal shovel, a perforated roaster for wheat or grain, brick- 
 moulds, and so on. On the other hand, a plate with a rim, a covered coal 
 shovel, a dish with raised divisions inside, an earthen spice-box, or an 
 inkstand with any divisions, may become imclean. Flat dishes of wood, 
 leather, bone, or glass, do not contract uncleanness, but hollow ones might 
 do so, not only like earthen ones, inside, but also outside. If they are 
 broken they are clean, but the broken part is unclean if large enough to 
 hold a pomegranate. If a chest, or clipboard, wants a foot, it is clean, 
 whatever its size, and a three-footed table, wanting even two feet, is clean, 
 but it may be made unclean if wanting the whole three feet, and the flat 
 top be used as a dish. A bench which wants one of the side boards, or 
 even the two, is clean, but if a piece remain a haudbreadth wide, it may 
 defile. If the liands are clean, and the outside of a goblet unclean, the 
 hands are not defiled by the outside, if the goblet be held by the jiroper 
 part. Every thing of metal, that has a special name, may defile, excej^t a 
 door, a door bolt, a lock, a hinge, or a door knocker. Straight blowing 
 horns are clean ; others may defile. If the mouthpiece is of metal, it may 
 
 / defile. If a wooden key have metal teeth, it may defile, but if the key be 
 
 I of metal and the teeth of wood, it is clean. 
 
 The removal of uncleanness was no less complicated. Even the kind 
 of water to be used for the different kinds of cleansing, for sprinkling the 
 hands, for dipping vessels into, aiid for purifying Ijaths for the person, 
 caused no little dispute. Six kinds of water were distinguished, each of 
 
 / higher worth than the other. First — A pool, or the water in a pit, cistern, 
 or ditch, and hill water that no longer flows, and collected water, of not 
 less quantity than forty scabs, if it has^not been defiled, is suitable for pre- 
 paring the heave-offering of dough, or for the legal washing of the hands. 
 
 2_ Second — Water that still flows may be used for the heave-offering (Teruma), 
 
 ^ and for washing the hands. Third — Collected water, to the amount of 
 forty seahs, may be used for a bath for purification, and for dipping 
 
 A vessels into. Fourth — A spring with little water, to which water that has 
 been drawn is added, is fit for a bath, though it do not flow, and is the 
 same as pure spring water, in so far that vessels may be cleansed in it, 
 
 6' though there be only a little water. Fifth — Flowing water which is warm, 
 ^ or impregnated with minerals, cleanses by its flowing ; and lastly, sixth — 
 Pure spring water may be used as a bath by those who have sores, or for 
 sprinkling a leper, and may be mixed with the ashes of purification. 
 
 These general principles formed the basis of an endless detail of casu- 
 istry. Thus, the Mischna discourses, at wearisome length, under what 
 circumstances and conditions " collected water " — that is, rain, spring, or 
 flowing water, that is not drawn, but is led into a reservoir directly, by 
 pipes or channels— may be used for bathing, and for the immersion of 
 vessels ; and the great point is decided to be that no drawn water shall have 
 mixed with it. A fourth of a log of drawn water in the reservoir, before- 
 hand, makes the water that afterwards falls or runs into it unfit for a bath, 
 
 J
 
 LIFE UNDEH THE LAW. 159 
 
 but it requires tliree log of drawn water to do tliis, if tlicrc were Avatcr 
 already in tlic reservoir. If any vessels are put nndcr the pipe emptying 
 itself in the bath, it becomes drawn water, and is unfit for a bath. Sham- 
 mai's school made it the same whether tlie vessel were set down on 
 purpose, or only forgotten ; but Ilillcrs school decided that if it had been 
 forgotten, the water might still be used for a bath. If drawn water 
 and rain water have mixed, in the court-yard, or in a hollow, or on the 
 steps of the bath-room, the bath may be used, if most of the water bo 
 fitting, but not if the proportion bo reserved. This, however, only takes 
 effect if they have mixed before entering the bath. If both flow into the 
 bath, the bath may be taken, if it be known certainly that forty seahs of 
 proper water ran in before three log of unsuitable water, but otherwise it 
 must not be taken. There was endless discussion, also, whether snow, 
 hail, hoarfrost, ice, and the like, could be used to fdl up a bath. So simple 
 an act as the washing of one's hands before eating entailed the utmost 
 care not to transgress some Eabbinical rule. The Avater could only be 
 poured from certain kinds of vessels, it must be water of a special kind, 
 o ily certain persons, in certain legal conditions, could pour it, and it was a 
 momentous point that the water should be poured neither too far up the 
 arm nor too low towards the hand. 
 
 This ceremonial slavery owed its rise to the reaction from the Syi'ian 
 attempts to overthrow the national faith. The Eabbis] of the austere but 
 noble puritan party, which had delivered their couiitry, sought to widen 
 the gulf, for the future, between Judaism and all other creeds, by laying a 
 fresh stress on legal purity and the reverse, and their scholars strove to 
 keep their rules as strictly as possible. The dread of touching anything 
 unclean, and the consequent self-withdrawal from the mass of the people, 
 and from the ordinary intercourse of life, soon showed itself in the name — 
 Pai'ush^ or^ PhaT[see — for those thus " sepai'ated." In the hands of this 
 party, cleanness and uncleanness steadily grew to a system of endless 
 refinements. 
 
 Ceremonial purity had, at first, been strictly observed only by the priests, 
 for the people at large were hardly in a position to attend to the many de- 
 tails required. After the Maccab^an revival, however, greater carefulness 
 was demanded. A priest, or Lcvite, lost the privileges of his caste if he 
 hesitated to fulfil any of the ritual obligations it entailed, and a proselyte 
 was rejected who would not undertake all that was required from an 
 Israelite. For Israelites themselves, these ceremo]iial rules were greatly 
 extended, and any neglect of them was noted unfavourably. The tithes, 
 etc., were strictly demanded from all produce, and were either entirely 
 forbidden to be eaten, or could be so only under fixed conditions, while a 
 wide sweep of injunctions and rules Vi'^as introduced as to the use of differ- 
 ent kinds of food, and even in every detail of family life. 
 
 Those, including, of course, the Rabbis, who undertook to observe all 
 these rules, henceforth formed a kind of union of " Comrades," or "Haber- 
 im," which any one might enter — all who did not join them being stigmat- 
 ized as ignorant Am-haaretzin, or boorish rabble. 
 
 It was to this league that the amazing development of legalism was
 
 160 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 latterly due, Careful inquiry was everywliere instituted to ascertain if all 
 dues for i:)riests, Levites, or the poor were regularly paid. An indefinite 
 due (Teruma) for tlie priests, and a tithe for them and the Levites, were 
 required each year from every kind of farm or garden produce, even the 
 smallest, and from all live stock, and property, of any kind, and a second 
 tenth each third year for the poor. Nor were these demands confined to 
 Israelites living in the strictly Jewish territory ; they were, after a time, 
 extended over those neighbouring countries in which Jews had settled. 
 These material results were only a subordinate advantage of this widely 
 extended claim ; it established an organized system of all-pervading in- 
 fluence in social intercourse, and on the private life of every household. 
 Part of the dues was Jwly, and to use anything holy was a mortal sin. 
 Every purchaser had, therefore, to make certain beforehand whether they 
 had been paid from what he proposed to buy, though many things in 
 the markets came from abroad, or had been grown or made by others than 
 Jews, or were under other complications as regarded their liability to 
 tithe and gift. 
 
 To save heavy loss it was conceded that the Teruma should be strictly 
 separated, but the various tithes were apparently left to be paid by the 
 buyer, though the assurance of an owner that everything had been tithed 
 could only be taken if the seller could prove his trustworthiness. Failing 
 this, all produce, and whatever was made from it, was regarded as doubtful, 
 and the Teruma, or holy portion, was to be taken from it before it could be 
 used. The second tithe might be turned into money, that it might be the 
 more easily consumed in Jerusalem. It was not obligatory, however, to 
 separate the first tithe, or that for the poor, since a doubt hung on the 
 matter, and so the Levite or the poor must prove their claim. These 
 harassing regulations shut off strict Jews from either buying or accepting 
 hospitality from any but their own nation, and made it imperative on 
 every fruit or food seller to establish his trustworthiness, by joining the 
 union of the " Comrades," or " Separated"— that is, the "Pharisees." It 
 required for this, only a declaration before three of the Kabbis, and after- 
 wards before three "trustworthy" persons, that one would henceforth 
 abstain from all that had not been tithed. Henceforth, not only was per- 
 sonal trustworthiness established, but that 'of all the members of his 
 family, and even of his des cendants, so long as no ground of suspicion 
 was raised against his wife, children, or slaves. 
 
 The nation was thus gradually divided into Haberim and Am-haaretzin 
 —strict followers of the Rabbis and despised rabble, — and intercourse and 
 hospitality between the two classes became steadily more circumscribed, 
 till it well-nigh ceased, as the laws of the Eabbis grew more exacting. It 
 was difficult, for instance, when from home, to ascertain the conscientious- 
 ness of a host, companion, or tradesman ; scruples rose whether produce 
 that might be foreign was liable to dues ; how far purchases not intended 
 for eating might be used without tithing, and so on, till all social freedom 
 was utterly hampered, and cases of conscience accumvilated which after- 
 wards filled whole volumes, and meanwhile gave constant anxiety. 
 
 This self -isolation from the community at large of the members of the
 
 LIFE UNDEE THE LAW. 161 
 
 "League of the Law," procuvcd them the name of Pcrfishim, or Pharisees 
 — that is, the separated — and introduced different grades of purity even 
 among them, according to tlie greater or less strictness in the observance 
 of the multitudinous Rabbinical rules. Religiousness consisted, above 
 everything, in avoiding ceremonial defilement, or removing it, if at any 
 time contracted, by prescribed washings and bathing. Rules for preserv- 
 ing Mosaic purity multiplied the risks of defilement as casuistry increased, 
 and thus a graduated scale of " holiness " was introduced, rising to the 
 harshest asceticism in its highest develojoment. To partake of anything 
 from which the due tithes had not been separated, or of the tithe itself, 
 or the priest's portion, the hands must be washed. Before eating parts 
 of sacrifices or offerings, a bath had to be taken, and a plunge bath was 
 required before the sprinlvling with water of purification, even if only the 
 hands were " unclean." But he who bathed in order to partake of what 
 was as yet untithed, had not the riglit to make use of the tithe ; he who 
 took a bath to qualify him to enjoy the tithe could not touch the priest's 
 portion; he who could touch that, could not eat what was holy, while he 
 who might touch it, must yet keep from water of purification. The higher 
 grades, on the other hand, included the less holy. Even to touch the 
 clothes of a " common man," defiled a Pharisee ; the clothes of an ordinary 
 Pharisee were unclean to one who could eat tithes ; those of an eater of 
 tithes to an eater of offerings ; and his, again, to one who enjoyed the 
 sprinkling of the water of purification. Some gained one grade, some 
 another, but few the highest. A special initiation, training, and time of 
 trial was required for each grade, from thirty days for the lowest, to twelve 
 months for the highest. 
 
 Religiousness was thus measured by the more or less complete observ- 
 ance of ten thousand Rabbinical rules of ceremonial purity, and fanatical 
 observance of them was secured, not less by religious pride, than by their 
 appeal to a spurious patriotism, and to self-interest. This severe and 
 inflexible discipline, which regulated every act of life, foresaw every 
 contingency, and interfered with common liberty, at every step, from the 
 cradle to the grave, had been slowly elaborated by the Rabbis, to isolate 
 the Jew from all other nations. His very words and thoughts were pre- 
 scribed ; he was less a man than a mechanical instrument. Any deviation 
 in word or deed, or even in thought, from Rabbinical law, was regarded 
 as im2:)ious. 
 
 Theocracies have enforced in all ages a similar isolation on their ad- 
 herents. " The kings of Egypt," says Diodorus, " could not act as they 
 would. Everything was ruled by laws, not only in their public, but even 
 in their most private life. The hours of the day and night at which special 
 duties must be performed, were fixed by law. Those for sleep, for rising, 
 for bathing, for sacrifice, for reading, for meals, for walking, and much 
 beside, were inflexibly prescribed. It was no less rigidly settled what 
 they were to eat at each meal, and what amount of wine they were to 
 drink." The Brahmin is under the same rigid and all-embracing tyranny 
 of religioiTS forms. His Avhole life is covered with the meshes of a vast 
 net of rites and ceremonies. The law of Maun prescribes how he is to eat,
 
 162 THE LIFE OF CUEIST. 
 
 and what, liow lie is to clothe himself, drink, wash his feet, cnt his nails, 
 and hair, batho, and perform even the most private functions. It fises 
 the rights and duties of each caste and subdivision of caste, the washers, 
 the weavers, the tillers of the soil, etc. Such systems annihilate individu- 
 ality, and reduce whole populations to a single tj^ie, which perpetuates 
 itself with an unchanging and almost indestructible constancy, begetting, 
 besides, a fanaticism which, at any moment, may burst into flames, 
 especially when identified, as in the case of the Jews, with patriotism. 
 Life under the Jewish law had already kindled this spirit of scarcely 
 veiled revolution long before our Lord's birth. 
 
 An additional illustration of the Avorking of Rabbinical rules in Jewish 
 daily life is afforded by those for the proper observance of the Sabbath. 
 In Exodus xvi. 5, it is commanded that food for the Sabbath be lorejiared 
 on the sixth day, no doubt with the design that the rest of the servant 
 should be as sacred as that of her master or mistress. The Rabbis, pon- 
 dering this command, raised the question whether an egg which a hen 
 had laid on a Sa,bbath could be eaten on the sacred day, and decided it by 
 a strict negative, if it had been laid by a hen kept to lay eggs ; because, in 
 that case, it was the result of work begun on a week-day, and brought to 
 an end on the Sabbath. On this the Ralibis were unanimous. But how 
 would it be if the hen v,'ere one intended not to lay eggs, but for eating, 
 and how, if a Sabbath, and a feast day observed as a Sabbath, should come 
 together ? On this point Shammai, one of the two great Rabbis of the 
 day, was disposed to be liberal, and decided that it was lawful to eat the 
 egg of a hen, itself destined to be eaten, on whichever day the egg had 
 been laid. But Hillel, the other great Rabbi, argued as follows : — Since 
 the egg has come to maturity on a Sabbath or feast day, and is therefore 
 of unlawful origin, it is not allowed to make use of it ; and though it woiild 
 be lav,r£ul to make use of the egg of such a hen, laid on a feast day or 
 Sabbath, not followed or preceded by another similarly sacred day, yet 
 it must not be eaten if two such days come together, because, otherwise, 
 there woidd be a temptation to use it on the second holy day. And since 
 it is forbidden even to carry unlawful food from one place to another, such 
 an egg must not only not be eaten, but must not be touched, to put it 
 away. The conscientious man, therefore, is not to put a finger on it, for 
 that might lead to his taking it altogether into his hand, and is not even 
 to look at it, for that might possibly make him wish he could eat it. 
 Hillel's opinion carried the day, for, says the Talmud, " There came a voice 
 from heaven, saying — ' The words of both are the words of the living God, 
 but the rule of the school of Hillel is to be followed.' " 
 
 These worthless puerilities were in keeping with the fantastic exaggera- 
 tions in which many of the Rabbis delighted. What shall we say of a 
 learned order, which has treasured in that great repertory of its sayings 
 and acts, the Talmud, such wild Eastern inventions as that Adam when 
 created, was so tall, that his head reached heaven, and so terrified the 
 angels by his gigantic size, that tliey all ascended to the upper heavens, 
 to God, and said, " Lord of the world, two powers are in the earth ! " and 
 that on this, God put His hand on the head of Adam, and reduced his
 
 LIFE UNDER THE LAW. 163 
 
 height to only a thousand cubits — over fifteen hundred feet ! "We are told 
 that there were sixty thousand towns in, the mountains of Judea, each 
 with sixty thousand inhabitants ; that there is a bird so large that when 
 it flies it intercepts the light of the sun ; that when the Messiah comes, 
 Jerusalem will have ten thousand palaces, and the same number of towers, 
 that there will be a hundred and eighty thousand shops of vendors of 
 perfumes alone; that Adam had two faces and a tail; that from one 
 shoulder to the other Solomon measured not less than sixty cubits ; and 
 that at one blow of an axe David killed two hundred men. 
 
 The form of teaching in the schools of the Rabbis was by question and 
 answer. The teacher propounded questions of legal casuistry to the 
 scholars, and let them give their oj^inions, adding his own, if he thought 
 fit. The scholars also could proi^ose questions in their turn. They sat, 
 during class time, on the ground, the teacher, on a raised seat, known as 
 the seat of Moses. As all the knowledge of the Law was strictly traditional 
 and oral, teacher and scholar alike had to depend entirely on memory, the 
 one faculty of supreme importance to both. To attain high fame, a Eabbi 
 must have the reputation of knowing the whole immense mass of tradition 
 down to his day, by heart, so as to be able to cite authorities for any 
 possible question. Originality was superstitiously dreaded, and nothing 
 more shrinkingly avoided than the giving any opinion unsupported by 
 that of some former Rabbi. To forget a single word he had heard from 
 his teacher was an inexpiable crime on the part of a scholar. 
 
 The feats of memory prodiiced by such a system were so amazing, that 
 we may readily credit the tradition of the whole Talmud having been 
 learned by heart, in sections, by the disciples of a Persian Eabbi, who 
 feared that all the coj^ies of it would be destroyed, in a local jDersecution, 
 in the seventh century. The mass of the Rabbis, to use a Jewish phrase, 
 must have been mere book-baskets ; grown childi'en, full of the opinions 
 of others, but piously free from any of their own — the ideal of pedants. 
 
 Officially," they were both jurists and preachers. They explained, de- 
 fined, and taught the Law in their schools ; gave judicial opinions and 
 decisions on it in their official meetings, and delivered expositions of 
 Scriptm^e, in their own style, to the people in the synagogues. Their 
 systems of interpretation were loeculiar. The professional statement of 
 Rabbinical Law, on one point or other, occupied them chiefly ; for every 
 Rabbinical precept had to be justified, not only by precedents, but by 
 some reference to the written Law, and this often required both tedious- 
 ness and ingenuity. There was no end of points on which a legal opinion 
 was volunteered from the synagogue pulpit, and trifles infinitesimal to 
 any but Jews, served for ceaseless wi'angling in the schools. 
 
 The interpretation of Scripture gave even more scope to Rabbinical 
 fancy. Three modes were in vogue : the using single letters to explain 
 whole words or clauses ; what was called the practical exposition ; and 
 what bore the name of the " Mystery "—an elucidation of the lofty seci-eta 
 of the Creation, the world of angels, and such transcendental matters, 
 from the most improbable sources. Rules were provided for the treatment 
 of these different methods, but the utmost license prevailed, notwithstand-
 
 164 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 ing. The nature and value of the instruction thus given may be judged 
 iTom some illustrations of the teaching, in the days of oiir Lord, respecting 
 the secret power of numbers. 
 
 In the first and last verses of the Bible the first letter Alei^li (k), occui'S 
 six times, and as six alejAs are equal to our figures 6,000— for the Jews 
 used letters for figures — it was held to be proved by this that the world 
 would last 6,000 years. Words in a verse might be exchanged for others 
 whose letters were of eqvial numerical value. Thus the statement, which 
 greatly offended the Eabbis, that Moses had married an Ethiopian woman 
 — in violation of his own law — was explained as a figure of speech which 
 hid an orthodox meaning. The letters of the word " Cusliith " n''E^'-"l3, an 
 " Ethiopian woman," when added together as figures, represented 736, and 
 the letters of the much more flattering words, " fair of face," made the 
 same sum, and, therefore, they were clearly the true meaning ! 
 
 Another fancy was to explain texts by putting the numerical value of a 
 word in the place of the word itself. Thus, in Proverbs viii. 21, the word 
 which we have translated — " substance "—was read as the number 310, 
 its value in figures, and the doctrine educed from it that God will give 
 310 worlds to every just man as his inheritance ! 
 
 This strange system was so much in vogue in the days of our Lord that 
 it occurs even in the New Testament, and in early Christian writings. In 
 the book of Eevelation the name of " the Beast " is veiled from common 
 eyes by the mystical number 666, but the reason for its being so becomes 
 very apparent when we find that it is a cypher for the letters of the name 
 of Need. The early Christians imagined that God had already revealed 
 the doctrine of the Cross to Abraham in the number of his servants — 318; 
 for 18 is written in Greek letters IH — the symbol of the word Jesus, and 
 300 is the letter T, which means the Cross ! With the same liking for 
 mystery, 801 was used as the symbol for Christ, because the Greek word 
 for dove (TrepLo-Tepa) makes that cypher, and so do the letters Alpha and 
 Omega. 
 
 This love of the mystical prevailed in all Eabbinical teaching. Tliiis 
 the account of the Creation and Ezekiel's vision of the Wheel were made 
 the foundation of the wildest fancies. " Ten things," we are told, " were 
 created in the twilight of the first Sabbath eve : — The abyss below the 
 earth (for Korah and his company) ; the mouth of the spring (of Miriam, 
 which gave the tribes water in the wilderness) ; the mouth of Baalam's 
 she ass ; the rainbow ; the manna in the wilderness ; the rod of Moses ; 
 the schamir (a worm which cleaves rocks) ; alphabetical characters ; the 
 characters of the Tables of the Law ; and the Tables of stone themselves. 
 Some Rabbis add to these — evil spirits, the grave of Moses, and the ram 
 that was caught in the thicket. 
 
 Such was the teaching of the Eabbis, as a whole; though even in such 
 sandy wastes there were not wanting specks of verdure, as one still sees 
 in the Talmud. Finer minds here and there, for a moment, gave a human 
 interest to these teachings, or touched the heart by poetry, and simple 
 feeling. But, as a rule, the "Law," to the study of which the youth of 
 Israel were summoned so earnestly, was a dreary wilderness of vrorthless
 
 JUDEA UNDER ARCIIELAUS AND ROME. 165 
 
 trifling. The spell of the age was on all minds, and bound them in 
 intellectual slavery. On every side, Christ, in His childhood and youth, 
 heard such studies extolled as the sum of wisdom, and as the one pursuit 
 supremely pleasing to God. Yet He rose wholly above them, and with 
 immense originality and force of mind, valued them at their true worth- 
 lessness, leaving no trace of their spirit in the Gospels, but breathing, 
 instead, only that of the most perfect religious freedom. It has been 
 sometimes insinuated that He only followed the teachers of His nation : 
 that He was indebted to Hillel, or to the Pharisees as a class : but enough 
 has been said to show that the latter were the representatives of all that 
 He most utterly opposed, and the distance between Him and Hillel ma}-- 
 be measured by their respective estimates of the sanctity of the marriage 
 bond, which the Ea1)ln treated so lightly as to sanction divorce, if a wife 
 burned her husband's dinner. 
 
 CHAPTEE XVIII. 
 
 JUDEA UNDER ARCHELAUS AND ROME. 
 
 r I "IHE death of Herod removed the strong hand that for more than a 
 -■- generation had repressed alike the hatreds and the hopes of the 
 nation. Fanaticism had muttered in secret, and had at last burst out in 
 the tumults at the Temple, just before he died ; but when he was gone, 
 there was no one to hold the wild forces in check that had so long been 
 pent up. 
 
 His reign had served the purpose, in Providence, of delaying the break- 
 ing up of the Jewish people and its being scattered among the nations, and 
 made its dissolution easier in the end ; while, on the other hand, it had 
 called forth the sympathies of heathenism for Judaism more strongly, and 
 had conquered lasting rights for it among the nations, as in a sense the 
 salt of the earth and the forerunner of Christianity. 
 
 The rejoicings of the nation, that the scandal of an Edomite sitting on 
 the throne of David was past, knew no bounds. A negro conqueror, at the 
 White House in Washington, in the days of slavery, would scarcely have 
 raised such indignant hatred, or have been so revolting to the national 
 instincts of the white population of America, as an Edomite reigning on 
 Mount Zion was to the Jews. Even the founders of the two races had 
 been mortal enemies, as the twin sons of Isaac, and Jewish tradition em- 
 bittered the story of Genesis, by adding that, at last, Esau killed Jacob 
 with an arrow from his bow. When Israel was coming from Egypt, Edom 
 had refused it a passage through its territory, and had entailed on it the 
 dreary years of wandering in the wilderness. The Edomites had been 
 mortal enemies of its first king. David had conquered them, and he and 
 Solomon had reigned over them. In the decline of Israel under its later 
 kings, they had been its deadliest and most implacable foes. They had 
 joined tlie Chaldeans in the final conquest of Judca under Nebuchadnezzar, 
 and liad rejoiced over the destruction of Jerusalem, in the ]io];)e of getting
 
 166 THE LIFE OF ClllilST. 
 
 possession of its richer territory, and adding it to their own wild mountain 
 laud. The i^rophcts, from Amos and Joel, in the ninth century before 
 Christ, had denounced them as the bitterest enemies of the theocracy. 
 " Edom shall be a desolate wilderness," cried Joel, " for their violence 
 against the children of Judah ; because they have shed innocent blood in 
 the laud." " For three transgressions of Edom, and for four, saith 
 Jehovah," cried Amos, " I will not turn away the punishment thereof, be- 
 cause he did pursue his brother with the sword, and did cast off all pity, 
 and his anger did tear perpetually, and he kept his wrath for ever. But I 
 will send a fire upon Teman, which shall devour the palaces of Bozrah." 
 Obadiah, after the destruction of Jerusalem by ISTebuchadnezzar, taunted 
 them with having been among the enemies of Israel, in the day when 
 strangers carried away cajDtive the force of the land, and foreigners entered 
 its gates and cast lots on Jerusalem, and with having rejoiced over the 
 children of Judah in the day of their destruction. Jeremiah and Ezekiel 
 had denounced the wrath of God against them, and, indeed, every prophet 
 had proclaimed them the enemies of God, whom Israel was one day to 
 crush with an utter destruction. During the exile they took possession of 
 great part of the territory of Judah, and were only finally driven back by 
 John Hyi'canus, who conquered them 130 years before Christ, and com- 
 pelled them to submit to circumcision. The deadly hatred of centuries 
 was intensified by such a history. " Thou hatest me," says Jacob to Esau, 
 in the book of Jubilees, " thou hatest me and my sons for ever, and no 
 brotherly love can be kept with thee. Hear this, my word, which I say — 
 When I can change the skin and the bristles of a swine to wool, and when 
 horns spring from its head like the horns of a sheep, then will I have 
 brotherly love to thee ; and when wolves make peace with lambs, that they 
 shall not devour them or spoil them, and when they turn their hearts to 
 each other to do each other good, then shall I be at jDcace with thee in my 
 heart ; and when the lion is the friend of the ox, and goes in the yoke and 
 ploughs with him, then will I make peace with thee ; and when the raven 
 grows white, then shall I know that I love thee, and shall keep peace with 
 thee. Thou shalt be rooted out, and thy sons shall be rooted out, and thou 
 shalt have no peace." It is thus that a Jew sjieaks of Edom, apparently 
 in the very days of Herod, and it is only the natural culmination, when he 
 prophecies, in the next chapter, that the sons of Jacob will once more 
 subdue and make bond-slaves of the hated race. 
 
 Yet one of this execrated and despised people had for more than a 
 generation ruled over Israel ! His death was the removal of a national re- 
 proach, that had been bitter beyond words. The hope of the land now 
 was that the abhorred usmper might prove the last of his race on the 
 throne of Judah. Ai'chelaus in his stead was even worse than to have had 
 Herod, for he was not only of Idumean blood, but his mother was of the 
 equally hated race of the Samaritans ! Eome, rather than Edom or 
 Samaria ! 
 
 Palace intrigues, and especially the systematic whisperings of Antipater, 
 who hated his brothers as rivals, had caused Herod to change his will once 
 and again in his last years. In the end nothing seemed likely to put an
 
 JUDEA UNDER ARCHELAUS AND ROME. 167 
 
 end to the rivalries of his family but the breaking up of the kingdom 
 which it had been the work of his life to create. His latest gained terri- 
 tories beyond the Jordan were left to Philip, the son of Cleopatra, a maiden 
 of Jerusalem, whom Herod had married for her beauty. Galilee, with 
 Perea, he left to his son Antipas, and Judea, Idumca, and Samaria, with 
 the title of king, to Ai'chelaus, both sons of Malthace. He had at one time 
 intended to have left the whole kingdom to Herod, son of the second 
 Mariamne, as successor to Antipater, but the complicity of the mother of 
 that prince in the intrigues of the Eabbis was fatal to him. Salome, 
 Herod's sister, the ruthless enemy of the Maccabeean family, received the 
 gift of the towns of Jamnia and Aslidod in the Philistine plain, and of 
 Phasaelis, in the palm groves of the Jordan valley. 
 
 As soon as Herod was dead his sister Salome and her husband set free 
 a multitude of the leading men of the Jews, whom Herod had summoned 
 to Jericho, that he might have them butchered at his own death. They 
 next assembled the army and the people in the amphitheatre at Jericho, 
 and having read a letter left by the dead king for the soldiers, opened his 
 will, which, with his ring, was to be carried forthwith to Osesar, that the 
 settlements might be confirmed, and the due acknowledgment of depend- 
 ence made. Meanwhile, the soldiers hailed Archelaus as king, and forth- 
 with took the oath of allegiance to him. It was noted, however, that 
 Archelaus held a grand feast on the night of his father's death. 
 
 This over, the funeral of Herod followed, after due preparation. All 
 the magnificence of the palace had been laid under contribution. The 
 body lay on a couch of royal purple ; a crown and diadem on its head ; a 
 sceptre in its right hand ; a j)urple pall covering the rest : the couch itself 
 standing on a bier of gold, set with a great display of the most precious 
 stones. Herod's sons and a multitude of his kindred walked on each side, 
 or followed. IvText came the King's favourite regiments : the body guard 
 given him by Augustus at Cleopatra's death ; the Thracian corps ; the 
 German regiment ; and the regiment of Gauls, all with their arms, stan- 
 dards, and full equipments ; then the whole army, horse and foot, in long 
 succession, in their proudest bravery. Five hundred slaves and f reedmen 
 of the coixrt carried sweet spices for the burial, and so they swept on, 
 amidst wailings of martial music, and, doubtless, of hired mourners, by 
 slow stages, to the new fortress Herodium, ten miles south of Jerusalem, 
 where the dead king had built a grand tomb for himself. But if there 
 were pomp and pageantry to do him honour, there was little love on the 
 part either of the nation or of his family, for Archelaus, who had prepared 
 all this magnificence, quarrelled with his relations, on the way, about the 
 succession, and scarcely had the corpse reached the first half-hour's stage, 
 before disturbances broke out in Jerusalem. 
 
 Archelaus paid the ciistomary reverence of a seven days' mourning aftef 
 the burial, closing them with a magniBcent funeral feast to the people. 
 He then laid aside his robes of mourning and put on white, and having 
 gone up to the Temple, harangued the multitude from a throne of gold, 
 thanking them for their ready submission to him, and making great pro- 
 mises for the future, when he should be confirmed in the kingdom by
 
 168 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Augustus. The crowds heard him peaceably till he ended, but he had no 
 sooner done so, than some began to clamour for a lightening of the taxes, 
 and others for the liberation of those in prison on account of the late 
 religious insurrection. All this he readily promised, and retired to the 
 palace. Towards evening, however, crowds gathered at the gates, and 
 began lamenting the Rabbis and youths, who had been put to death by 
 Herod for cutting down the golden eagle over the Temple, in the late 
 tumult, and demanding that the oflficials who had executed Herod's com- 
 mands should be punished ; clamouring, besides, for the deposition of 
 Joazar, of the house of Bocithos, whom Herod, in compliment for having 
 married into the family, had appointed high priest in the place of Matta- 
 thias, a friend of the national cause. More dangerous still, they demanded 
 that Archelaus should at once rise against the Eomans, and drive them 
 out of the country. His utmost efforts to appease them were vain. Each 
 day saw a greater tumult, and, to make matters worse, the city was filling 
 with countless multitudes coming to the Passover, now at hand. Force 
 alone could restore order, and this he was at last compelled, most reluc- 
 tantly, to use. A bloody street battle followed, in which 3,000 were slain, 
 and the Passover guests were shut out of the city, and returned home 
 without having been able to keep the feast. The winds, long chained by 
 Herod, had broken loose. 
 
 Archelaus forthwith set off for Eome, leaving Philip regent in his 
 absence. Doris, Herod's wife, Salome, his sister, and other members of 
 the family, went with him, ostensibly to support his claims, but in reality 
 to oppose him, for the family hated him as the son of a Samaritan, and, 
 even more, as a second Herod. Antij^as, also, started for Rome, to plead 
 his own claims to the kingdom, on the strength of a former will, and, as 
 the elder, was secretly supported in his enterprise, with refined treachery, 
 even by those who escorted Archelaus. 
 
 The family would have liked an oligarchy, in which all could share, 
 rather than any king, but preferred a Roman governor to either Arche- 
 laus or Autipas ; but if one of these two must be chosen, they wished 
 Antipas rather than his brother, whom they all hated. At Rome the two 
 claimants canvassed eagerly among the Senators, in favour of their rival 
 causes, and lowered their dignity by unseemly disputes. Meanwhile, a 
 deputation of fifty Jews arrived from Jerusalem to protest against Arche- 
 laus being made king, and to ask the incorporation of Judea with Syria, 
 as part of a Roman province, under a Roman governor, thinking that 
 Rome would be content with their submission and tribute, and leave the 
 nation independent in its religious affairs. The embassage was received 
 with great enthusiasm by the Jews of Rome, eight thousand of whom 
 escorted them to the Temple of Apollo, where Augustus gave them 
 audience. All possible charges against Herod, though now dead, were 
 detailed at length — his Avholesale proscriptions and confiscations; his adorn- 
 ing foreign cities, and neglecting those of his own kingdom ; his excessive 
 taxation, and much more ; the petitioners adding that they had hoped for 
 milder treatment from Archelaus, but had had to lament 3,000 of their 
 countrymen slain by him at the Temple, at his very entrance on power.
 
 JUDEA UNDER ARCHELAUS AND ROME. 1G9 
 
 The peojjle, they said, wished only one thing, deliverance from the Hei'ods, 
 and annexation to Syria. The whole scene of the audience was, erelong, 
 widely reported in Jndea, and stamped itself deejoly on the national 
 memory, esj^ecially the fact that Archelaus, adding the last touch to the 
 humiliation to whicli both brothers had stooped, threw himself at CsBsar's 
 feet to implore his favour. Many years after, Jesus needed to use no 
 names, in His parable of the pounds, to tell whom He meant, when He 
 spoke of a king, against whom His people clamoured before a foreign 
 throne — " We will not have this man to rule over us." 
 
 Archelaus was only in part successful. A few days after the pleadiugs, 
 from respect to Herod's will, and, doubtless, influenced by a bequest of 
 ten millions of drachmaj in it to himself, a gift equal to about £375,000, 
 besides jewels of gold and silver and very costly garments, to Julia, his 
 wife, Cccsar raised the suppliant from his feet, and ai^pointed him ethnarch 
 of the part of the kingdom left him by Herod ; promising to make him 
 king hereafter, if he were found worthy. Idumea, Judea, and Samaria, 
 with the great cities, Jerusalem, Samaria, Ceesarea, and Joppa, were 
 assigned him ; but Gaza, Gadara, and Hippos, as Greek cities, were incor- 
 jjorated with the province of Syria. His revenue was the largest, for it 
 amounted to 600 talents, or about £120,000. Antipas had only a 
 third part as much, and Philip only a sixth. The immense sum of money 
 left him by Herod, CiEsar retui-ned to the sons, reserving only a few costly 
 vessels as mementoes. 
 
 While these strange scenes were enacting at Rome, things were going 
 on very badly in Palestine. As soon as Archelaus had sailed, the whole 
 nation was in uproar. The massacre at his accession had been like a spark 
 in explosive air, and the flame of revolt burst out at once. The moment 
 seemed auspicious for the re-erection of the theocracy, with God for the 
 only king, as in early days. The rich, and such as had no higher wish 
 than the material advantages of trade and commerce, which they would 
 bring, desired govex^nment by a Roman procurator. They regarded reli- 
 gion, government, law, and constitution, with equal indifference, setting 
 their personal ease and gain before anything else. But for generations 
 there had been a growing jaarty in the land, Avhose ideas and aims were 
 very different. From Ezra's time, the dream of a restored theocracy had 
 been cherished, through all the vicissitudes of the nation, with undying 
 tenacity, by a portion of the people. The political system of the Pentateuch 
 was their sacred ideal. Kings over Israel were, in their eyes, usurpers 
 of the rights of Jehovah, against whom Samuel, the great prophet, had, 
 in His name, jirotested. The heathen could no more be tolerated now than 
 the Canaanites of old, whom God had commanded their fathers to drive 
 out. The land was to be sacred to Jehovah and His people, under a high 
 priesthood only, to the exclusion of all foreign or kingly rule. The im- 
 possibility of restoring such a state of things, after the changes of so 
 many centuries, may have been felt, but was not acknowledged. It stood 
 commanded in the Holy Books, and that was enough. Their fathers had 
 murmured under Persian domination, and had eagerly grasped at the 
 promises of the Greek conqueror, demanding, however, that they should
 
 170 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 include tlio safety of tlieir special institutions. When Grecian supremacy, 
 in its turn, became corrupt, and tlircatened the destruction of the " Law," 
 the " pious " revolted, and fought, under the Maccabees, for the true 
 religion, but still in the foi'm of a theocracy. They continued faithful to 
 the great patriot family, as long as it maintained the high priesthood as 
 the highest dignitj^ of the state, but they had taken up arms onl}^ to 
 defend the faith, and as soon as they were able once more to practise its 
 rites, and to give themselves \\-p again to religious study, they forsook the 
 ranks of the Maccabajans, unwilling to take any part in the consolidation 
 of a political power to which they attached no value. In the end, Judas 
 had been well-nigh deserted, and could gather only a handful of 3,000 
 followers, and his brother, who succeeded him, had to flee with a rem- 
 nant of their adherents, to the fens and reed beds of Lake Merom, or the 
 wilds of Gilead. The long peace which prevailed in the reign of John 
 Ilyrcanus, after his wars were ended, Avas devoted by the Rabbis to the 
 creation of the famous "hedge " round the Law, to prevent for ever the 
 religious apostasy and decay which had almost ruined Judaism under the 
 Syro-Grcek dvnasty. From this time we hear of the " unsociability " of 
 the Jews towards other nations. Pharisaism, or separation, was erected 
 into a system, and was pushed to its ultimate and most rigorous con- 
 sequences with a zeal and fanaticism that excite wonder. The extreme 
 party became known as the " Separation," while the courtly party round 
 the king, who were contented to follow the Law as written, conscientiously 
 and rigorously, were called in irony the Saddouk, or " righteous," or, as 
 we call them, the Sadducees. 
 
 The indifference of the Pharisaic, or ultra party, to jiolitical affairs, and 
 their concentration on the observance and elaboration of the Law, became, 
 in the end, the characteristic of the people at large. During the civil war 
 between Hyrcanus and Ai-istobulus, the two Asmoncan brothers, they 
 stood, as much as possible, aloof. The Jew is democratic by nature, and 
 seeks equality, whether under a foreign or native government. " The holy 
 nation," " the kingdom of priests," recognised no other distinction than 
 that of superior piety and knowledge of the Law, which are only 
 personal virtues, and cannot be transmitted. The Asmonean family, once 
 on the throne, lost much of the popular sympathy, and the joriostly aristo- 
 cracy which formed the court, became objects of aversion. From the last 
 years of John Hyrcanus to the death of Jannasus, the Eabbis, living in 
 retirement, attracted to themselves more and more the vital force of the 
 nation ; and dm'ing the nine sunny years of royal patronage, under 
 Alexandra, instead of busying themselves in heaping up wealth and in- 
 creasing their power, they laboured to found a legal system which should 
 secure the triumph of their ideas. Disinterestedness is always attractive, 
 and it had its reward in creating a fanatical devotion to the Eabbis, which 
 knew no limits. " Love work, keeiJ apart from politics, and have nothing 
 to do with office," was the maxim of Shemaia, the successor of Simeon Ben 
 Slietach. The struggle between Hyrcanus and Aristobulus had no interest 
 to the Pharisees. The Talmud, which embodies Eabbinical feeling, never 
 mentions even the names of any of the five Maccabees — not eve'n that of
 
 JUDEA UNDER ARCHELAUS AND ROME. 171 
 
 Judas, — and the spelling and meaning of the word Maccabee were alike 
 unknown to its compilers. The history of the nation was utterly ignored 
 by these dreamy trauscendentalists, who recognised no earthly power 
 whatever. 
 
 But even among the Rabbis, and the blindly fanatical people, there was 
 an ultra party of Irreconcilables. From the first, even Rabbinical stern- 
 ness and strictness were not stern and strict enough for some, and there 
 appeared, at times within the circle of the Rabbis, at others, outside, men 
 of extreme views, who would tolerate no compromises such as the Phari- 
 sees were willing to accept. They would acknowledge neither prince nor 
 king, far less any foreign heathen power. Already, in the days of John 
 Hyrcanus, they had begun to mutter discontentedly, and their voices rose 
 louder under Alexander Jannceus, who tried to crush them bj' the fiercest 
 persecution. But when Pompey came, as conqiieror, and arbiter of the 
 national destiny, they once more, by their eai-nest protests, showed 
 that their party was still vigorous. In the civil wars, many of them fought 
 for the Asmonean princes ; but, under Herod, they were so mercilessly 
 held down that no political action on their part was possible, and they had 
 to devote themselves to the eager study of the Law, which made his 
 reign the Augustan age of Rabbinism. But in their schools they could 
 £.t least kindle the zeal of the rising youth, and this some of them did only 
 too effectively. Even in the sternest days of Herod's reign, moreover, 
 some had not been wanting to maintain a fierce protest against his usurp- 
 ation of the throne, which they believed belonged only to God. The so- 
 called robbers, ci'ushed by him at Arbela, seem to have been rather patriotic 
 bands, wrong it may be in the means pursued, but nol)le in their aims, 
 who sought to carry out the theocratic dream. The foremost leader of 
 these fierce zealots had been that Hezckiah whom Herod, with much diffi- 
 culty, had secured and put to death. His son Judas, the GaliliEan, was 
 now, in his turn, to raise the standard of national liberty and institutions. 
 
 Quintilius Varus, the future victim, with his legions, of Arminius, in 
 Germany — now governor of Syria — had come to Jerusalem, on account 
 of the disturbances at the accession of Archelaus. After some executions, 
 supposing that he had restored order, he returned to Antioch, leaving 
 behind him in Jerusalem, under Sabinus, a whole legion instead of the 
 garrison that, in peaceful times, would have been thought sufficient. He 
 could hardly have done worse than put such a man as Sabinus in command, 
 for, like Roman governors in general, in that day, he was a man of no 
 principle, bent only on making a fortune, even by the vilest means, while 
 he had opportunity. He infuriated the Jews by forcing the surrender of 
 the castles of Jerusalem into his hands, to get possession of Herod's trea- 
 sures, which he at once appropriated to his own use. Plunder was his 
 one thought, and to secure it, no act of lawless violence was too audacious. 
 Extortion and robbery drove the people to fury. Not only the city, but 
 the country everywhere seethed with excitement. It seemed a fitting 
 moment to strilce for their long lost national liljerty, and to set up the 
 theocracy again, under the Rabbis, after having driven out the heathen. 
 Their fanaticism knew no caution or prudence, nor any calculation of the
 
 172 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 odds against them. Miracles would be wrought, if needed, to secure their 
 triumph, and was not the Messiah at hand ? It was, moreover, the time 
 of Pentecost, and an immense body of men from Galilee, Idumea, Jericho, 
 and Perea, but above all, from. Judea, taking advantage of the feast, hurried 
 up to Jerusalem to join issue with, the greedy robber plundering the city. 
 Dividing themselves into three camps, they fortliAvith invested the city, 
 and Sabinus, in terror, withdrew to the fort Phasaelis. But the storm 
 soon burst on him. Crowding the roofs of the Temple cloisters, the Jews 
 rained down a storm of missiles on the Eoman soldiers sent to dislodge 
 them, till at last these, finding other means useless, fired and nearly 
 destroyed the cloisters, — the dry cedar of the roofs, and the wax in which 
 the plates of gold that covered them were bedded, feeding the flames only 
 too readily. The Temple itself was now at the mercy of the assail- 
 ants, who avenged themselves by plundering its treasures, Sabinus 
 himself securing 400 talents — about £'83,000 — for his share. But this only 
 infuriated the people still more, and even Herod's army was so outraged 
 by it, that all the troops, except the Samaritan regiments — numbering 
 3,000 men — went over to the popular side. Meanwhile, the flame of revolt 
 spread over the whole country. The discharged soldiers of Herod began 
 plundering in Judea, and 2,000 of them got together in Idumea and fought 
 stoutly against the new king's party, driving Herod's cousin, Achiab, who 
 was sent against them, to take refuge in the fortresses, while they held 
 the open country. Across the Jordan, in Perea, one Simon, who had been 
 a slave of Herod, put himself at the head of a great band, who acknow- 
 ledged him as king, and doubtless hoj^ed, by his means, to deliver their 
 country, and restore its religious freedom. Betaking themselves to the 
 defile between Jerusalem and Jericho, they burned Herod's palace at the 
 latter city, and carried flame and sword to the homes of all who did not favour 
 tiiem. A corps of Roman soldiers sent out against Simon soon, however, 
 scattered his followers, and he himself was slain. 
 
 Further north, Athronges, a shepherd of the wild pastures beyond the 
 Jordan, put himself at the head of the popular excitement. He was a man 
 of great size and strength, and with four brothers, all, like him, of lofty 
 stature, strove in his own wild way to avenge his country. Gathering a 
 vast multitude of followers, he kei^t up a fierce guerilla warfare against 
 the troops sent out to put him down, and was able to keep the field for 
 years, so well was he supported by the people. 
 
 But the most alarming insurrection broke out in Galilee, the old head- 
 quarters of the Zealots, under Hezekiah, in the last generation. Judas, 
 his son, born on the other side of the Jordan, but known as the Galilajan, 
 had grown to manhood full of the spirit of his father. The same lofty ideal, 
 of restoring the land to God as its rightful king, had become the dream of 
 his life. The time seemed to favour his rising for " God and the Law," as 
 his father, and the heroes of his nation, had done in the past. The brave 
 true-hearted Galilteans, ever ready to fight at the cry that the Law was 
 in danger, rallied round him in great numbers, and at their head he 
 ventured on an enterpi'ise which made him the hero of the day, in every 
 town and village of the land. Scpphoris, a walled hill citj, over the hills
 
 JUDEA UNDER ARCHELAUS AND ROME. 173 
 
 Irom Nazareth, was the capital of Galilee, and the great arsenal in the 
 north. This fortress, sitting on its height like a bird, as its name hints, 
 Judas took by storm, and its capture put in his hands arms of all kinds 
 for thousands, and a large sum of money. 
 
 How long he was able to keep the field is not known. The Eomans lost 
 no time in taking steps to crush him and the other rebels. Varus, afraid 
 of the safety of the troops he had left in Jerusalem, set off southward 
 from Antioch with two more legions, and four regiments of cavalry, in 
 addition to the auxiliary forces supplied, as was required of them, by the 
 local princes round. As he passed through Berytus, that city added its 
 fiuota of 1,500 men, and Aretas, king of Arabia Petrasa, sent him a large 
 contingent of irregulars, in the shape of wild Arab horsemen and foot 
 soldiers. The whole force rendezvoused at Ptolemais, and from this point 
 Varus sent his son, with a strong division, into Galilee, while he himself 
 marched, by way of Esdraelon and Samaria, to Jerusalem. Samaria 
 having been loyal — for it would have been the last thing its citizens would 
 have done to join the hated Jews in a w\ar for their Law — was left un- 
 touched. Varus pitching his camp at a village called Arus, which the 
 Arab auxiliaries set on fire as they left, out of hatred to Herod. As they 
 appi-oached Jerusalem, Emmaus, where a company of Eoman soldiers had 
 ])con attacked and partly massacred by Athronges, was found deserted, 
 and was burned to the ground, in revenge for the insult that had been 
 offered to the army of Eome. Beaching the neighbourhood of the capital, 
 the besieging force of the Jews at once dispersed, and Varus marched in 
 without a blow. With keen dissimulation, the Jerusalem Jews forthwith 
 laid all the blame of the troubles on the Passover crowds, asserting that 
 they had been as much besieged as Saljinus. Meanwhile, the troops 
 scoured the country for fugitives, 2,000 of whom were crucified along the 
 roadsides near Jerusalem. A Jewish force of 10,000 men, still afoot, dis- 
 banded itself, and the revolt in Judea was for the moment suppressed. 
 Several of the relations of Herod who had taken part in the rising, and 
 had been sent prisoners to Eome, were the last victims for the time. 
 
 The force under the son of Varus had meanwhile been busy in the 
 north. Sepphoris was retaken, its inhabitants sold as slaves, and the 
 town itself burned to the ground, but Judas escaped for the present, to 
 begin a still more terrible insurrection a few years later. 
 
 Peace was thus, at length, restored, and the young princes entered on 
 their inheritances, thanks, once more, to Eome. But the land had been 
 desolated: the bravest of its youth had died on the battle-field : cities and 
 villages lay smouldering in their ashes. Samaria alone profited by the 
 attempted revolution ; for not only did it suffer nothing, but a third of its 
 taxes were remitted and laid on Judea— a new ground of hatred towards 
 the " foolish people " of Shechcm. 
 
 The sensual, lawless, cruel nature of Archelaus, with his want of tact, 
 which, together, had turned both his family and his father's wisest 
 counsellors against him, leave us little doubt of the character of his reign. 
 The general estimate of him was that, of all his brothers, he was most like 
 his father. Hv returned from Eome degraded in his own eyes by having
 
 174 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 had to bog his kingdom on his knees, and by the people, and all his re- 
 lations, except the just and honourable Philip, having tried to prevent his 
 success with Augustus. His one thought -was revenge. Jesus, though 
 an infant when Ai^chelaus began his reign, must have often heard in later 
 years of his journey to Eome and its humiliations, and of the savage 
 reprisals on his return ; for, as I have said, lie paints the story unmistak- 
 ably in the parable of the great man who went into a far country, to 
 receive a kingdom ; whose citizens hated him, and sent after him protest- 
 ing that they would not have him to reign over them. The fierce revenge 
 of Archelaus could not fail to rise in the minds of those who heard, in the 
 parable, how the lord, on his return, commanded his servants to be called, 
 and rewarded the faithful richly, but stripped the doubtful of everything, 
 and put to death those who had plotted against him. 
 
 Archelaus began his reign by such a reckoning with his servants and 
 enemies. When he took possession of his monarchy, says Josephus, he 
 used, not the Jews only, but the Samaritans, barbarously. In Jerusalem 
 he deposed the high priest of the Boethos family, on the charge of having 
 conspired against him. But though this might have pleased the Pharisees 
 and the people, who counted the BoiJthos high priest unclean, he only 
 roused their indignation by filling the office with two of his own creatures 
 in succession. His treatment of his people generally was so harsh, that 
 Jews and Samaritans forgot their mutual hatred in efforts to get him 
 dethroned. His crowning offence, however, was marrying Glaphja^a, the 
 widow of his half-brother Alexander, to whom she had borne children. 
 She had gone back to her father, the friend of Herod and Antony, after 
 the death of her second husband. King Juba, of Libya, when Archelaus 
 met her on his way back from Rome, and falling violently in love with 
 her, married her after divorcing his wife. Her former career in Jerusalem 
 might have made him hesitate to bring her back again, for her haugh- 
 tiness, keen tongue, and affected contempt of Salome, and Herod's family 
 generally, had been one great cause of her first husband's death, while her 
 training her children, as she did, in heathen manners, had made her hate- 
 ful to the people. Her incestuous marriage, now, involved both her and 
 Archelaus in the bitterest unpopularity. But she did not live long to 
 trouble any one. It seemed as if the return to the scene of her early 
 marriage life had waked only too vivid recollections of her murdered 
 husband. Soon after it she dreamed that he came to her and accused her 
 of her infidelity to him in marrying Archelaus, and the dream so affected 
 her that she sickened, and in a few days died. 
 
 Archelaus had not the same taste for heathen architecture or public 
 games as his father, and, perhaps to his own hurt, was much less an adept 
 at public flattery of the Emperor and his ministers, and he was wise or 
 timid enough to put no heathen or objectionable impress on his coins. 
 At Jericho he rebuilt, with great magnificence, the palace burned down 
 by Simon, and he founded a town on the western hill-slopes of the Jordan 
 valley, in Samaria, calling it Arclielais, after himself, and embellishing it 
 with fine conduits, to water the palm groves in his gardens, but beyond 
 this he left no monuments of his reion. His time and heart were too
 
 JUDEA UNDER AECIIELAUS AND ROME. 175 
 
 mucli engrossed with vice and drunkenness to leave mucli interest for 
 anything else. 
 
 The hatred of the people and of their leaders, the Pharisees, which had 
 striven to prevent his getting the throne at first, gi'ew only fiercer with 
 time. The struggle continued, with true Jewish pertinacity, for nine 
 years, fanned more or less openly by the ethnarch's relations, and their 
 factions at court. At last, in the beginning of the year a.d. 6, things 
 came to a crisis. Judea and Samaria, whom common oppression had, for 
 the moment, made friendly, sent a joint em.bassy to Rome, to accuse the 
 tyrant, before his master, of having aflxonted the imperial majesty, by not 
 observing the moderation commanded him. Archelaiis was thoroughly 
 alarmed. Superstitious, like his dead wife, he dreamed that he saw ten 
 ears of wheat, perfectly ripe, presently eaten by oxen, and at once taking 
 the dream as an omen, was told by one Simon, an Esscne, that the ten 
 heads of wheat were ten years, and marked the length of his reign. Such 
 a forecast was only too easy. The embassy to Eome had done its work. 
 Caesar was indignant, and ordered the Eoman agent of Archelaus, a man 
 of the same name, to sail at once for Palestine, and summon his master to 
 the imperial presence. Five days after the dream the messenger reached 
 Jerusalem, and found Archelaus feasting with his friends. The imperative 
 summons brooked no delay, and the vassal instantly set out for Italy. 
 There his fate was speedily decided. Accusers and accused were brought 
 face to face, and Archelaus was sentenced to perpetual banishment, and 
 the confiscation of all his pi'operty to the Emperor. The place of his exile 
 was fixed at Yienne, in Gaul, a town on the Rhone, a little south of the 
 modern Lyons, in what, long afterwards, became the province of Dauphine. 
 Here he lived in obscurity till his death, amid the vines of southern 
 France, perhaps a wiser and happier man than in the evil years of his 
 greatness. His reign was the beginning of the end of Herod's kingdom, 
 his dominions being forthwith incorporated with Syria, as part of that 
 Roman province. The wish of the Jews was at last gratified, but they 
 were soon to feel how bitterly they had deceived themselves in supposing 
 that incorporation with Rome meant religious independence. The Castle 
 at Jericho, and the palm groves and buildings of Archelai's, wei'e the only 
 memorials of the ethnarch, except the bitterness written on every heart 
 by his cruelties and oppressions. 
 
 A man of unspeakably greater importance in his influence on the nation 
 — Hillel, the gentle, the godly, the scholar of Ezra, appears to have passed 
 aAvay in these last months of excitement, at the age, it is said, of 120. 
 Boi-n among the Dispersion, in Babylon, he had come to Jerusalem, long 
 years before, to attend the famous schools of Abtalion and Shcmaiah, 
 which Herod's proscriptions would have well-nigh crushed in later years, 
 destroying Rabbinism with them, but for the genius who had been trained 
 in their spirit. Already a married man, he had no income but the tkiily 
 pittance of half a denarius, earned as a light porter or day labourer, 
 though his one brother was a great Rabbi and president of the school at 
 Baljylon, and his other was growing to be a wealthy man in Jerusalem. 
 But the rich one did not trouble himself about him, and affected to despise
 
 llQ THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 lilm, and the other, though eminent, was, very likely, himself poor. 
 Unable, one day, to pay to the doorkeeper of the school the trifling fee for 
 entrance, Hillel was yet determined to get the knowledge for which his 
 soul thirsted. It was a Sabbath eve in winter, and the classes met on the 
 Friday evening, continuing through the night, till the Sabbath morning. 
 To catch the instruction from which he was shut out, Hillel climbed into 
 a window outside, and sat there, in the cold, for it was bitter weather, and 
 snow was falling heavily. In the morning, says the tradition, Shemaiah 
 said to Abtalion: " Brother Abtalion, it is usually light in our school by 
 day ; it must be cloudy this morning to be so dark." As he spoke, he 
 looked up and saw a form in the window outside. It was Hillel, buried in 
 the snow, and almost dead. Carrying him in, bathing and nibbing him 
 with oil, and setting him near the hearth, he gradually revived. " It was 
 right even to jprofane the Sabbath for such an one," said the teachers and 
 students. 
 
 Five or six years after the beginning of Herod's reign, Hillel rose jtojoe 
 the head of the Eabbinism of Jerusalem, as the only man to be found who 
 had studied under Abtalion and Shemaiah. After a time, a rival school rose 
 under Shammai. Hillel, though a strict Jew, had still a leaning to charit- 
 able and liberal ideas in some directions ; Shammai was the embodiment 
 of the narrow ultra-Pharisaic spirit, and, as such, much more numerously 
 followed than his milder rival. Hillel's weakness, as well as strength, lay 
 in his love of peace, for he too often gave up principle to maintain quiet. 
 Many of his sayings are preserved, but most of them are inferior to those 
 left by Epictetus or Seneca. His summary of the Law ; to a heathen, is 
 1 1 the best known, — " What you would yourself dislike, never do to your 
 j j neighbour — that is the whole Law ; all else is only its application." But, 
 ' like all the Rabbis, his religious system was radically unsound. Its 
 central principle was the belief in strict retaliation, or recompense, for 
 every act. Like for like was the sum of his morality. Seeing a human 
 skull floating on a stream, Hillel cried out, " Because thou hast drowned 
 (some one), thou thj^self art drowned, and he who has drowned thee will 
 himself some day also be drowned." The same way, he believed, would it 
 be at the final judgment. " He who has gained (the knowledge of) the 
 Law," said he, " has also gained the life to come." Service and payment, 
 his fundamental motive to right action, inevitably led to formalism and 
 selfish calculation, fatal to all real merit. 
 , The banishment of Archelaus found Jesus a growing boy of about ten 
 i or twelve, living quietly in the Galilean l^azareth, among the hills. It 
 / proved a momentous event in the declining fortunes of the nation, for its 
 ' results presently filled the land with terror, and paved the way for the 
 final crisis, sixty years later, which destroyed Israel as a nation. 
 
 The troubles of Herod's time, and the dreams of the Eabbis, had excited 
 a very general desire, at his death, for direct government by Eome, under 
 the proconsul of Syria. The deputation sent to Augustus, when Archelaus 
 was seeking the throne, had prayed for such an arrangement, thinking 
 they would be left under their high priests, to manage their national 
 afi^airs after their own customs, as the Phenician cities were allowed to do
 
 U ,Si, .v ^ 
 
 s 
 
 JUDEA UNDER ARCHELAUS AND ROME. 177 
 
 under their Archons, and that Eome would only interfere in taxation and 
 military matters. Their wish, however, was the only ground of their ex- 
 pectation, for Rome never left large communities like the Jewish nation 
 thus virtually independent, though they might indulge towns or cities 
 with such a jn-ivilege. 
 
 When Archelaus, at the entreaty of the people, liad been banished, their 
 hopes revived of the restoration of the theocracy under the high priests 
 and the Rabbis, with a nominal supremacy on the part of Rome. The 
 exile of the tyrant, therefore, was greeted with universal joy ; but the news 
 that a prociu'ator, or lieutenant-governor, as ho might be called, had been 
 appointed in his stead, and that Judea was henceforth to be incorporated 
 into the i^rovince of Syria, with its proconsul, or governor-general, as 
 supreme head, under the Emperor, soon dispelled their di'cams of theocratic 
 liberty. 
 
 The jiroconsul, or governor-general, of Syria, at the time, was Publius 
 Sulj^icius Quirinius, a brave soldier, and faithful servant of the Emperor, 
 accustomed to command and to be obeyed. Ordered to incorporate Judea 
 with his province, no thought of consulting Jewish feelings in doing so 
 crossed his mind. From comparative obscurity he had risen, through 
 military and diplomatic service, till Augustus had named him consul. He 
 had made a successful campaign in Asia Minor, against some tribes of 
 savage mountaineers, whom he succeeded in subduing, by blockading the 
 moiuitain passes, and after starving them into submission, had secured 
 their future quiet by carrying off all the men able to bear arms ; banishing 
 some, and di'afting the rest into his legions. For this he had gained the 
 honour of a triumph. When Cains, the young grandson of Augustus, was 
 treacherously wounded in Armenia, he had maiiaged affairs for him so 
 much to the satisfaction of the Emperor, that he got the province of Syria 
 as a reward. With all this, lie bore a bad character with those who knew 
 him, or were any way under him, as not only malignant and grasping, but 
 mean and revengeful. As a proof of this it was instanced, that he kejit a 
 charge of attempted poisoning over his wife's head, for twenty years after 
 he had divorced her. 
 
 The procurator, or lieutenant-governor, appointed over Judea by 
 Quirinius, was Coponius, a Roman knight, unknown except from this 
 office. He and Quirinius made their appearance in Jerusalem together, as 
 soon as Archelaus had been condemned, to take possession of his effects 
 for Augustus. They lodged in the palace of Herod, which, henceforth, 
 was called the Pra3torium, and became the residence of the procurators 
 when they were in Jerusalem at the time of the feasts, for, except then, 
 they lived in C^sarea. The Herod family had to content themselves with 
 the old castle of the Maccabasan kings, near the Xystus. 
 
 Any golden dreams of a restored theocracy were soon dispelled. Hardly 
 had the inventory of the possessions of the crown been finished, before 
 Quirinius announced that his next duty was to take a census of the peojole, 
 and a return of their property and incomes, as the basis for introducing 
 the Roman taxation common to all subject provinces of the empire. There 
 could be no clearer proof that the nation had deceived itself. Rich and 
 
 N
 
 178 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 poor alike resented a measure whicli annouuced slavery instead of freedom, 
 and ruinous extortion instead of prosperity. In every country the intro- 
 duction of a new fiscal system, with its intrusion into private affairs, its 
 vexatious interferences with life and commerce, its new and untried 
 burdens, and the general disturbance of the order of things which custom 
 has made familiar, is always unpopular. But in this case patriotic and 
 religious feeling intensified the dislike. It was at once the direct and 
 formal subjection of the country to heathen government, the abrogation 
 of laws with which religious ideas were blended, and the fancied profana- 
 tion of the word of Jehovah and of His prophets, that Israel would be as 
 the sand on the sea-shore, loMch cannot he numbered. It was recalled to 
 mind, moreovei% that when the wrath of God turned against Israel, He 
 moved David to give the command, " Go, number Israel and Judah." It 
 ran also from mouth to mouth that old i:)rophecies foretold that the 
 numbering of the people would be the sign of their approaching fall as a 
 nation. To the fanaticism of the Jew the census was a matter of life and 
 death; to Quirinius, who could not comprehend such a state of feeling, it 
 was the simplest matter in the world. The very first step in the Roman 
 government of Judea brought it into conflict with the i^eople. 
 
 The systematic and direct taxation of the country by Rome was, from 
 this time, an inextinguishable subject of hatred and strife between the 
 rulers and the ruled. The Romans smiled at the political economy of the 
 Rabbis, who gravely levied a tax of half a shekel a head to the Temple, to 
 avert a national pestilence, and proposed that a census of the people, cal- 
 culated by the number of the lambs slaughtered in Jerusalem at the last 
 Passover, should be the basis of the imperial fiscal registration. But if 
 this was ridiculous to the Roman, it was a matter so sacred to the Jew, 
 that it led to ever-fresh revolts, after thousands of patriots had died to 
 maintain it. The Jewish law recognised taxes and free gifts only for 
 religious objects, and, according to the Rabbis, the very holiness of the 
 land rested on every field and tree contributing its tithe, or gift of wood, 
 to the Temple. How, it was asked, could this sacredness be maintained, 
 if a heathen emperor received taxes from the sources consecrated to 
 Jehovah by these tithes and gifts P Hence the question rose, " whether 
 it was lawful to i^ay tribute to Oa;sar or not ? " — a question to be solved 
 only by the sword, but rising ever again, after each new despairing 
 attempt at resistance. Every " receipt of custom " at the gate of a town, 
 or at the end of a bridge, was a rock against which the Jew who honoured 
 the Law felt his conscience wrecked, or a battle-field marked by deadly 
 strife. 
 
 This sullen antipathy to imperial taxation was, moreover, intensified by 
 the evils of the Roman system. The chief imposts demanded were two — 
 a poll and a land tax, the former an income tax on all not embraced by 
 the latter. The income tax was fixed by a special census, and was rated, 
 in Syria and Cilicia, at one per cent. All landed property of private 
 individuals was subject to the ground tax, while the JcAvish crown posses- 
 sions were confiscated entirely to the imperial exchequer. The tax 
 amounted to a tenth of all grain, and a fifth part of wiue and fruit, and
 
 JUDEA UNDEB ARCHELAUS AND ROME. 179 
 
 was thus very oppressive. Both imposts were in the hands of " publicans," 
 who bouglit from the censors at Eome the right of collecting the taxes for 
 five years. These puljlicani farmed the revenue from the State, giving 
 security for the payment of a fixed sum for the province whose taxes they 
 bought. There were, however, extraordinary taxes and local imposts, 
 besides the two great ones. If corn ran short in Italy the provinces had 
 to supply it at fixed prices, and the procurator at Ctesarca had the right 
 to demand for himself and his attendants what supijlies he required. 
 
 The customs and excise duties, moreover, were levied for the imperial 
 government — and the tolls on bridges and roads, the octroi at the gates 
 of towns, and the custom-houses at the boundaries of districts or provinces, 
 which, also, were farmed by the publicani, gave additional room for 
 arbitrary oppression. The whole system was radically bad, like its 
 counterparts under the Ancien Regime in France, and in Turkey, now, 
 Tlio Eoman knights who took contracts for provinces, sub-let them, by 
 districts, to others, and these again had sub-contractors to smaller and 
 smaller amounts. The worst result was inevitable whore self-interest 
 was so deeply involved. Each farmer and sub-farmer of the revenue 
 required a profit, which the helpless provincials had, in the end, to pay. 
 The amount assessed by Rome was thus no measure of the ultimate ex- 
 tortion. The greed and opportunity of the collectors, in each descending 
 grade, alone determined the demand from the taxpayer. 
 
 Nor was there a remedy. The publicani were mostly Roman knights, 
 the order from which the judges were chosen. They were the capitalists 
 of the empire, and formed companies to take up the larger contracts, and 
 these companies, like some even in the present day, were more concerned 
 about the amount of their dividends than the means of obtaining them. 
 Complaints could only be laid before an ofRcial who might himself intend 
 to farm the same taxes at a future time, or v»'ho was a partner in the 
 company that farmed them at the moment. Thus, safe from the law, the 
 oppression and extortion practised by the collectors were intolerable. 
 The rural population were especially ground down by their exactions. A 
 favourite plan was to advance money to those unable to pay demands, and 
 thus make the borrowers private debtors, whose whole property was ere- 
 long confiscated by the usurious interest required. 
 
 Caesar has left us a vivid pictiire of the fate of a Roman province in 
 matters of taxation. Speaking of Pius Scipio, the proconsul of Syria in 
 B.C. 48, he tells us that he made large requisitions of money on the towns, 
 and besides exacting from the farmers of the taxes the amount of two 
 years' payment, then due to the Roman treasury, demanded as a loan the 
 sum which would be due for the next year. All this extortion, we may be 
 sure, would have to be more than made up by the unfortunate provincials. 
 Having brought his troops to Pergamum, one of the chief cities of the 
 province of Asia, he quartered them for the winter in the richest cities, 
 and quieted their discontent by great bounties, and by giving up the 
 towns to them to plunder. 
 
 The money requisitions levied by him on the province were exacted 
 with the xitmost severity, and many devices were invented to satisfy tho
 
 180 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 proconsul's rapacity. A head tax was imposed on all, Ijotli slave and free : 
 taxes were laid on columns and doors ; corn, soldiers, arms, rowers, 
 military engines and conveyances, were taken by reciuisition. If anything 
 could be thought of as a pretext for a new tax, the tax was imposed. Men 
 with military authority were set over cities, and even over small villages 
 and i^etty fortified places ; and he who used his power most harshly and 
 remorselessly, was thought the best man and the best citizen. The 
 province was full of lictors [and bailiffs ; it swarmed with officials and 
 extortioners, who demanded more than was due for the taxes, as gain for 
 themselves. In addition to all this, enormous interest was asked, as is 
 usual in time of war, from all who had to borrow, which many needed to 
 do, as the taxes were levied on all. ISTor did these exactions spare the 
 Roman citizens of the province, for additional fixed sums were levied on 
 the several communes, and on the separate towns. Cicero, on his entry 
 on the proconsulate of Cilicia, found things equally sad in that province. 
 He tells us that he freed many cities from the most crushing taxation, and 
 from ruinous usury, and even from debts charged against them falsely. 
 The province had been nearly ruined by the oppressions and rapacity of 
 his predecessor, whose conduct, he says, had been monstrous, and more 
 like that of a savage wild beast than a man. Such pictures, by Romans 
 themselves, leave us to imagine the misery of the wretched provincials 
 under proconsuls and procurators, and account in no small degree for the 
 recklessness of Judea under the Roman yoke. 
 
 Jesus grew up to manhood amidst universal murmvirs against such a 
 system, the discontent becoming more serious year by year. At last the 
 Senate, on the recommendation of the Emperor Tiberius, sent Germanicus, 
 the Emperor's nephew, to Syria, as a necessary step towards calming the 
 popular excitement. The Jews had already sent a deputation to Rome, to 
 represent the ruin brought on their country by the crushing weight of the 
 taxes. The deepening exhaustion of Palestine by the fiscal oppression of 
 the Romans, and of Herod's family, is incidentally implied in many pas- 
 sages of the Gospels. One of the most frequent allusions in Christ's 
 discourses is to the debtor, the creditor, and the prison. The blind 
 misrule that was slowly destroying the empire fell with special weight on 
 an agricultui'al people like the Jews. In one parable, Jesus represents 
 every one but the king as bankrupt. The steward owes the king, and the 
 servant owes the steward. The question what they should eat and what 
 they should drink is assumed as the most joressing, with the common man. 
 The creditor meets the debtor in the street, and straightway commits him 
 to prison, till he pay the uttermost farthing, and, if that fails, sells him, 
 his wife, his children, and all that he has, to make up his debt. Oil and 
 wheat, the first necessaries of life, are largely claimed by the rich man's 
 steward. Buildings have to be left unfinished for want of means. The 
 merchant invests his money, to make it safe, in a single pearl, which he 
 can easily hide. Many bury their money in the ground, to save it from 
 the oppressor. Speculators keep back their grain from the market, and 
 enlarge their barns. Instead of a field which needed the plough, the 
 spade suffices. " What shall I do ? " says the ruiuea steward, " I caunot
 
 THE EOMAN PR0CURAT0E3. ISl 
 
 dig, I am ashamed to beg." In the train of scarcity of money comes the 
 usurer, who alone is prosperous, speedily increasing his capital five or 
 ev^en ten times. This state of things is constantly assumed in the 
 Gospels, and it grew woi'se and worse through the whole life of our Loi'd, 
 culminating in a great financial crisis, throughout the empire, a few years 
 after the Crucifixion. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE KOMAN PROCURATOES. 
 
 npiIE material ruin wliicli Rome had brought on the land, naturally in- 
 -'- creased the prevailing excitement, and the bands of fierce religionists 
 which lurked in the hill-country, constantly received additions from those 
 whom the evil times had beggared. The popular mind was kept in per- 
 manent agitation by some tale of insult to the Law on the part of the 
 Romans. At one time they had " defiled the feasts," at another a military 
 standard had been shown in Jerusalem, or a heathen emblem brought into 
 the Temple, or a votive tablet set up on Mount Zion, or a heathen sculjj- 
 ture had been discovered on some new public building. Real or imagined 
 offences were never wanting. Kow, it was heard, with horror, that a 
 procurator had plundered the Temple treasures ; then, a Roman soldier 
 had torn a copy of the Law ; or a heathen had passed into the forbidden 
 court of the Temple, or some Gentile child, in his boyish sport, had mocked 
 some Jew. The most trifling rumours or incidents became grave from the 
 passion they excited, and the hundreds or thousands of lives lost in the 
 tumults they kindled. The heart of the whole country glowed at white 
 heat, and ominous flashes continually warned Csesar of the catastrophe 
 approaching. 
 
 The excitement caused by the inquisitorial census of persons and 
 property by Quirinius was intense. Herod and Archelaus in their taxation 
 had been careful to avoid direct similarity to the Temple tenth, and 
 possibly it was because the revenue had to be raised in any circuitous way, 
 to prevent collision with the popular prejudices, that the imposts these 
 princes had levied — tolls, house tax, excise, market tax, head tax, salt tax, 
 crown tax, and custom dues, — had pressed on the nation so heavily. 
 Augustus had waived the introduction of the Roman modes of taxation, 
 from similar motives of prudence, and Herod, while he had taxed produce, 
 took care to avoid requiring a tenth. But Quirinius had no such scruples, 
 and at once kindled the fiercest resistance. The whole nation saw in the 
 tithe on grain and the two-tenths on wine and fruit, an encroachment on 
 the rights of Jehovah. A leading Rabbi — Zadok — headed the opposition 
 in his class, and joined JudaSjjthe Galilajan, who again appeared in the 
 field, callhig on all to take arms. The Rabbis inveighed against the pro- 
 posals of Quirinius, but he cared nothing for their theology, and as he had 
 broken the moilutaineers of Cilicia by starvation, he felt no doubt that he 
 could keep order, in spite of resistance, among the Jews, Ambition, lovo
 
 182 
 
 o£ money, and military rule, engrossed tlie thoughts of the rough, coarse 
 soldier. 
 
 At fii'st it seemed as if he would succeed. The high priest, Joazcr, a 
 Herodian of the house of Boethos, openly took his side, and persuaded the 
 people in Jerusalem to let the census and registration go on quietly. The 
 Rabbis temporized, and seemed inclined to take the safer side. But this 
 did not content tlie whole body. The more determined were weary of the 
 endless discussions and trifling of the Synagogue, and broke away from 
 their brethren to found a new school — that of the " Zealots " — which 
 henceforth carried in its hand the fate of the nation. The fanatics of 
 Judaism — their one sleepless thought was war with Rome. They were 
 the counterparts and representatives of the stern puritans of the Mac- 
 cabtean times, and took their name, as well as their inspiration, from the 
 words of the dying Mattathias — " Be Zealous, my sons, for the Law, and 
 give your lives for the covenant of your fathers." The exhortations of 
 their brethren, to submit quietly to the government, were answered in the 
 words of the early patriots — " Whoever takes on him the yoke of the Law 
 is no longer under that of man, but he who casts off the Law, has man's 
 yoke laid on him." Thus, the foreboding that this numbering of the 
 people, like that of David, would bring death in its train, was not un- 
 accomplished. The fierce ruin broke forth from Gamala, on the Sea of 
 Gennesai^eth, a district in which the census was not to be taken; and 
 the destroying angel who passed through the land was Judas the 
 Galila^an. 
 
 Judas is one of those ideal forms which have an aljiding influence on the 
 imagination ; an enthusiast, raised above all calculations of prudence or 
 possibility, but so grand in his enthusiasm, that while he failed utterly in 
 his immediate aim, he more than triumphed in the imperishable influence 
 of his example. He vras the first of the stern Irreconcilables of his nation, 
 and from his initiative sjDrang the fierce and joitiless fanatics whose 
 violence led, two generations later, to the frightful excesses of the great 
 revolt, and to the ruin of the nation. The cry which drew round him the 
 youth of the country, had been, in part, the inarticulate longing of count- 
 less noble souls, though mingled with a spirit of proscription they would 
 have repudiated. " No Lord but Jehovah : no tax but to the Temple : no 
 friend but a Zealot." It was idolatry to pay homage to Cassar ; idolatry 
 to pay dues to a heathen government ; it was defilcmeiit of what was pure, 
 to give tithes or custom from it to the Unclean, and he who demanded 
 them was the enemy of God and of Israel, worthy of double punishment 
 if a Jew. War with Rome, and with their brethren willing to live at peace 
 with it, were alike proclaimed. Fire and sword wasted the land. The 
 country house of the rich Sadducee, and the ricks and barns of the well- 
 to-do friend of Rome, everywhere went up in flames, at the first conflict of 
 the rude but fiercely brave patriots with the Roman soldiery. Inke our 
 own Fifth Monarchy men, they believed that the kingdom of God could be 
 set up only by the sword. In the stern spirit of the Old Testament, they 
 thought only of hewing Agag in pieces before the Lord, believing them- 
 selves God's instruments to rid the land of His enemies^ ranking as such,
 
 THE ROMAN PROCUEATOES. 183 
 
 in effect, all but themselves and their suijporters. He was a jealous God, 
 who would suffer no other lords in His inheritance, and His will was a 
 war of extermination on the heathen invaders, like that of Joshua against 
 the Canaanites. 
 
 From the Nazareth hills, Jesus, as a growing boy, saw daily the smoke 
 of burning villages, and in Joseph's cottage, as in all others in the land, 
 every heart beat fast, for long weeks, at the hourly news of some fresh 
 story of blood. But the insurrection was, erelong, sujDpressed : Judas 
 dying in the struggle. The terrible story, however, was never forgotten. 
 Many years after, Gamaliel could remind the authorities how " the Galilean 
 drew away much people after him but perished, and as many as obcj'cd 
 him were dispersed." Even the Eomans learned a lesson, and never at- 
 tempted another census ; for the proconsul Gestius Gallus, so late as the 
 reign of Nero, was content to reckon in the Jewish manner, by the number 
 of Passover lambs. To the peojile at large, Judas and his sons were a 
 new race of Maccabasan heroes ; for the sons— Jacobus, Simon, Menahcm, 
 and Eleazar — in after years, carried out the work of their father with a 
 splendid devotion. None of the four died in bed. They either fell in 
 battle against Eome, or by their own hand, to prevent their being taken 
 alive. When all Judea had been lost but the rock of Masada, it was a 
 grandson of Judas who was in command of that last citadel of his race, 
 and boasted to his comrades that as his family were the first who rose 
 against the heathen, so they were the last who continued to fight against 
 them, and it was he, who, when all hope had perished, slew, by their own 
 consent, the 900 men who were shut up with him, and set the fortress in 
 flames, that Eome might find nothing over which to triumph but ashes 
 and corpses. The grand self-immolation of Judas became a deathless 
 example, and kept Eome uneasy for seventy years, nor is Josephus wrong 
 in saying that though the insurrection lasted hardly two months, it kindled 
 a spirit which reduced Palestine to a desert, destroyed the Temple, and 
 scattered Israel over the earth. Galileo and Judea never showed their 
 lofty idealism more strikingly than in producing such leaders, or in con- 
 tinuing to believe in them after their disastrous end. 
 
 Meanwhile Quirinius had gained his point in a measure, and the poll 
 and ground taxes were imjiosed on the Eoman plan, by the close of the 
 year. But nothing was done to lighten the previous burdens, of which 
 the house and market taxes, especially, were hateful to the people. The 
 fiscal result, however, was far below Eoman expectations. Although 
 Herod had been regarded as the richest king of the East, the estimate 
 forwarded by Quirinius to the Emperor, of the value of all the taxes, 
 amounted to less than a twelfth part of the sum dei'ived from Egypt. 
 The computation was sent for each tax, that Augustus might sanction it, 
 and let it be put up for sale to the publicani. 
 
 The opposition to this heathen taxation, though thus outwardly sup- 
 pressed, was otily nursed the more closely in the hearts of all. The Eabbis 
 still taught that the land was defiled by dues paid to a heathen emperor, 
 and attributed every real or fancied natural calamity to the displeasure of 
 the Almighty for its being so. " Since the purity of the land was de-
 
 184 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 stroyed," sakl tho}'-, '*' even the flavour and smell of tlio fruit are gone." 
 The Roman tithe soon told fatally on that which had hitherto been paid to 
 the Temple, and tliis the Rabbis especially resented. " Since the tithes are 
 no longer regularly paid," said they, "the yield of thc'fields has grown less." 
 Hence the question constantly passed from mouth to mouth, not whether 
 the Roman tax should be paid, but whether it was lawful at all to pay it. 
 
 The hatred and contempt for those of their countrymen who, under 
 such circumstances, took service as collectors, under the associations of 
 publicani farming the odious taxes, may be imagined. The bitter relent- 
 less contempt and loathing towards them knew no bounds. As the Greeks 
 spoke of " tax-gatherers and sycoi^hants," the Jews had always ready a 
 similarly odious association of terms such as " tax-gatherers and sinners," 
 "tax-gatherers and heathen," "tax-gatherers and prostitutes," "tax- 
 gatherers, murderers, and highway robbers," in speaking of them. Driven 
 from society, the local publicans became more and more the Pariahs of 
 the Jewish world. The Pharisee stepped aside with pious horror, to avoid 
 breathing the air poisoned with the l^reath of the lost son of the House of 
 Israel, who had sold himself to a calling so imfamons. The testimony of 
 a publican was not taken in a Jewish coiirt. It was forbidden to sit at 
 table with him or to eat his bread. The gains of the class were the ideal 
 of uncleanness, and were especially shunned, every piece of their money 
 serving to mark a religious offence. To change coin for them, or to accept 
 alms from them, defiled a whole household, and demanded special purifi- 
 cations. Only the dregs of the people would connect themselves with a 
 calling so hated. Cast out by the community, they too often justified the 
 bad repute of their order, and lived in reckless dissipation and profligacy. 
 To revenge themselves for the hatred shown them, their only thought, not 
 seldom, was to make as much as they could from their office. The most 
 shameless imposition at the " receipts of custom," and the most hardened 
 recklessness in the collection of excessive or fraudulent charges, became 
 a daily occurrence. They repaid the war against themselves by a war 
 against the community. 
 
 Amidst such a state of feeling between rulers and ruled, Jesus grew up 
 to manhood and spent His life. The sleepy East could not endure the 
 systematic and restless ways of the "West, now forced upon it, and, still 
 less, the regular visit of the tax-gatherer, esjaecially under such a vicious 
 system as that of Rome. War, as far as possible, became the chronic 
 state of things, if not in the open field, yet in never-ending, ever-beginning 
 resistance, all over the land. Even the mild school of Hillel justified the 
 rise of any means of escape from the robbery of the " publicans," and the 
 Rabbis at large made the subject a standing topic in their schools. Con- 
 troversies sprang up in connection with it. The Irreconcilables, as I may 
 call the Zealots, could not brook even the slight concessions to Rome of 
 the hitherto popular Pharisees. It was made a matter of reproach to 
 them that they put the name of the Emperor along with that of Moses in 
 letters of divorce, and the dispute was ended only by Hillcl's party re- 
 minding its oi^ponents that this was already sanctioned by Scripture itself, 
 which allowed the name of Pharaoh to stand beside that of Jehovah.
 
 THE EOMAN iTvOCURATORS. 185 
 
 Before Qairinius left Jerusalem, he yielded one point to the j^coplc, by 
 saci'ificing to their hati'ed the instrument of his tyranny — tlie high priest, 
 Joazer. After helping to get the census carried out, and thus losing all 
 l)opular respect, the time-serving priest was stripped of his dignity by the 
 master who had despised even while he made use of him, and it was given 
 to Hanna s, the son of Seth, in whose family it was held, at intervals, for 
 over fifty years. But though his house was thus permanently ennobled, 
 its taking office under the Eomans, no less than its belonging to the party 
 of the Sadducecs, made it, henceforth, of no weight in the destiny of the 
 nation. The Zealots were steadily rising to be a great party in the land. 
 The noblest spirits flocked to their banner most readily, as we may judge 
 when we remember that one of the Apostles had been a Zealot, and that 
 the young Saul also joined them. The young men, especially, swelled 
 their numbers. " Our youth," laments Josephus, " brought the state to 
 ruin, by their fanatical devotion to the ferocious creed this party adopted." 
 Its principles were, indeed, destructive of all government, as things were. 
 " He who was under the Law," it was held, " was free from all other 
 authority." Its members were pledged to honour Jehovah alone as King 
 of Israel, and neither to shrink from death for themselves nor from mur- 
 dering their nearest kin, if it promised to serve the cause of liberty, as 
 they understood it. The family of the fallen Judas remained at the head 
 of these fierce patriots. Two of his sons were afterwards crucified for 
 raising an insurrection, and while his third son, Menahem, by the taking 
 of Masada, was the first to', begin the final war against Florus, his grand- 
 son, Eleazar, was the last who fought against the Eomans, burying him- 
 self, as has been told, and the wreck of the Zealots, beneath the ruins of 
 the fortress, rather than surrender. It is noteworthy, moreover, tliat 
 from the date of the census, no part of Palestine was less safe than that 
 which was directly under Eoman authority. If the traveller between 
 Jericho and Jerusalem fell among robbers, what must have been the 
 danger in the lonely and desolate valleys beyond Hebron ? 
 
 "I'he first seven years after the annexation were, notwithstanding, com- 
 paratively happy times for the Jews. Augustus made it his maxim to 
 spare rather than destroy the provinces, so far an he could safely do so; 
 and he furthered this policy by frequent change of the procurators. As 
 to the burning religious questions raised by the decay of heathenism, and 
 the spread of Eastern religions in the empire, he took, by advice of 
 Ma3cenas, a middle course. He supported the Eoman religion, but, at the 
 same time, protected the special faith of each country. Hence, although 
 he personally despised foreign religions, and offered no sacrifices when in 
 Jerusalem, even while asking with interest about the Jewish God, and 
 though he praised his grandson, the young Caius CaDsar, for passing 
 through Jerusalem like a Eoman, without making any offering, yet, like 
 Ca;sar and Cicero, elsewhere, he would by no means do any violence to 
 the Jewish religion. On the contrary, he yielded to the wish of Herod, by 
 taking the Jews of the Dispersion under his protection, as Ca3sar had done, 
 and sanctioned the remittance of the Temple money from all parts. Be- 
 sides this, he acted with the greatest consideration towards the Jews in
 
 186 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Rome ; for since the campaigns of Pompoy and Gabinins, tlicy had been 
 so numerous in the capital that they formed a great " quarter " on the 
 farther side of the river. Treating them as clients of Cfcsar, he acted 
 with marked thoughtfulness in all connected with their religion, their 
 morals, or their prosperity. He formally sanctioned the Jewish Council 
 in Alexandria, and, after the annexation of Judea, he ordered a pei^manent 
 daily sacrifice of an ox and two lambs to be offered at his expense, and, in 
 conjunction with the Empress Livia, and other members of his house, sent 
 gifts of precious jars and vessels for the use of the drink-offering. 
 
 This policy was not without its effect. Augustus got the fame in Eome 
 of being the patron of the Jews, and in the jorovinces, even among the 
 Jews themselves, of being the magnanimous protector of their religion. 
 His tolerance, moreover, served an end which he did not contemplate. It 
 secured the slow but certain conquest of the West, first by Judaism, the 
 pioneer of a new and higher faith, and then by Christianity — the faith for 
 which it had prepared the way. 
 
 But in spite of every desire on the part of Augustus to humour their 
 peculiarities, the Jews were still in a state of chronic excitement. The 
 Samaritans seeing their opportunity, raised their heads more boldly. 
 They were no longer dependent on Jerusalem, since tlie banishment of 
 Archclaus. Their elders rejoiced in political consequence long denied 
 them. But the light and giddy masses of the people could not make a 
 right use of liberty. Under Copouius, the first procurator after Archelaus 
 was deposed, it was discovered that they had defiled the Temple at Jeru- 
 salem 071 the night before the Passover. The Temple doors, as was the 
 custom, had been opened at midnight, before the feast, and some Samari- 
 tans, knowing this, and having previously smuggled themselves into 
 Jerusalem, had crept up to the Temple in tlie dai'kness, and strewed 
 human bones in the courts, so tliat the high priest Hannas had to turn 
 away, from the polluted sanctuary, the worshippers who in the morning 
 thronged the gates. Nothing remained for the vast multitudes but to go 
 back embittered to their homes, leaving the Temple to be purified, but 
 nothing is said of any punishment of the Samaritans. The procurator 
 seems only to have told the Jews that they should have kept a better watch. 
 
 Little is known of the two procurators — Marcus Ambivius and Annius 
 Rufus, who followed Coponius — except that Judea, exhausted by its 
 burdens, implored their diminution, and that, under the first, Salome, 
 Herod's sister, died, while Augustus, himself, died under the second. 
 
 The new emperor, Tibjerius, on his accession, sent a fresh procurator, 
 Valerius Gratus, whom, with his dislike of change, he retained in ofiice 
 for eleven years. Under him things went from bad to worse. During his 
 period of office he changed the higli priests five times, deposing Hannas, 
 and giving the office alternately to one of his family, and to a rival house of 
 the small band of Sadducean Temple nobility. Large sums no doulit filled 
 his coffers at each transaction, but such a degradation of their highest 
 dignitaries must have exasperated the Jews to the quick. After the 
 crafty Hannas came, as bis successor, one Ismael, but his reign was only 
 one year long. Hannas' son, Eleazer, next won the pontifical mitre for a
 
 THE EOilAN PROCUEATORS. 187 
 
 year ; then came Simon, but lie, too, had to make way for a successor, 
 ^aiaphas, son-in-law of Hannas, afterwards the judge of Jesus. Simon is 
 famous in Eabbinical annals for a misfortune that befell him in the night 
 before the Day of Atonement. To while away the long hours, during , 
 which he was not permitted to sleep, he amused himself by conversation 
 with an Arab sheikh, but, to his dismay, the heathen, in his hasty utter- 
 ance, let a speck of spittle fall on the priestly robe, and thus made its 
 wearer unclean, so that his brother had to take his place in the rites of the 
 approaching day. Changes so violent and corrupt had at last degraded 
 the high priesthood so much in the eyes of all, that the deposed Hannas, 
 rather than his successors, was still regarded as its true representative. 
 
 Meanwhile, the load of the public taxes became so unendurable that a 
 deputation was sent to Eome in the year 17, to entreat some alleviation of 
 the misery. Syi'ia, as a whole, indeed, seemed on the brink of an insur- 
 rection, from the oppression of the publicans. Germanicus, the Emj^eror's 
 nephew, one of the noblest men of his day, was sent to the East to quiet 
 the troubles ; but, unfortunately, with him was sent, as Governor- General 
 of Syria, Cneius Piso, his deadly enemy, who soon involved him in per- 
 sonal disputes that well-nigh excited a war between them. Tiberius, able 
 and cautious, and not yet fallen fco the hatefulness of his later years, saw 
 no remedy for this state of things but in prolonging the reign of the pro- 
 curators. " Every office," he was wont to say, " induces greed, and if the 
 holder enjoy it only for a short time, without knowing at what moment he 
 may have to surrender it, he will naturally plunder his subjects to the 
 utmost, while he can. If, on the other hand, he hold it for a lengthened 
 term, he will grow weary of oppression, and become moderate as soon as 
 he has extorted for himself what he thinks enough." " On one of my 
 campaigns," he would add, by way of illustration, " I came upon a wounded 
 soldier, lying on the road, with swarms of flies in his bleeding flesh. A 
 comrade, pitying him, was about to drive them off, thinking him too weak 
 to do it himself. But the wounded man begged him rather to let them 
 alone, ' for,' said he, ' if you drive these flies away you will dome harm 
 instead of good. They are already full, and do not bite me as they did, 
 but if you frighten them off, hungry ones will come in their stead, and 
 suck the last drop of blood from me.' " The heartless cynic in the purple 
 had no pity, and was far enough from a thought of playing the Good 
 Samaritan, by binding up the wounds of any of the races under him, far 
 less those of the hated Jews. In Eome itself he treated them with the 
 bitterest harshness, and his example reacted on those in Palestine. In the 
 year 19 he drove the Jews out of Eome. " Four thousand freedmen in- 
 fected with this superstition" (Judaism), says Tacitus, "being able to 
 carry arms, were shipped off to the island of Sardinia to put down the 
 robber hordes. If they perished from the climate it was little loss. The 
 rest were required to leave Italy, if they did not forswear their unholy 
 customs by a certain day." Suetonius says that Tiberius even compelled 
 them to burn their sacred robes and utensils, but Josephus boasts that 
 those di-afted into the legions preferred dying as martyrs, to breaking the 
 Law.
 
 188 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 In Judea, these measures were attributed to the influence of Sejanus, 
 the hated favourite of Tiberius. It was, doubtless, with no little alarm 
 that the news came in the yeav 26, when the iniiuence of Sejanus was at 
 its height, that Valerius Gratus had at length been recalled, and Pontius 
 Pilate appointed in his stead. The client was worthy of the patron. 
 Venal, covetous, cruel, even to delighting in blood, without principle or 
 remorse, and yet wanting decision at critical moments, his name soon 
 became specially infamous in Judea. He bore himself in the most 
 offensive way towards the people of Jerusalem. The garrison of Antonia 
 had hitherto always left the ornaments of their militai-y standards at the 
 head-quarters in Cassarea, since the Jews would not suffer the Holy City 
 to be profaned by the presence of the eagles and the busts of the 
 emperors, of which they mainly consisted. But Pilate, apparently on the 
 first change of the garrison, ordered the new regiments to enter the city 
 by night with the offensive emblems on their standards, and Jerusalem 
 awoke to see idolatrous symbols planted within sight of the Temple. 
 Universal excitement spread through the city, and the Eabbis and people 
 took mutual counsel how the outrage could be removed. The country 
 soon began to pour in its multitudes. The violent party counselled force 
 but the more sensible prevailed as yet, and a multitude of the citizens 
 hurried off to Pilate at Cgesarea, to entreat him to take away the cause of 
 such bitter offence. But Pilate would not listen, and treated the request 
 as an affront to the Emperor. Still the crowds continued their appeal. 
 For five daj^s and five nights they beset the palace of Herod in which 
 Pilate resided, raising continually the same cry, that the standards might 
 be removed. Determined to end the matter, he at last summoned them 
 to meet him on the seventh day in the circus. Meanwhile, he had filled 
 the spaces round the arena with soldiers, and when the Jews began to 
 raise their mutinous cries again, on his refusing to yield, he ordered the 
 troops to enter with drawn swords. But he had miscounted their fanatical 
 earnestness. Baring their throats, and kneeling as if to meet the sword, 
 the multitude cried out that they would rather part with their life than 
 their Law. Pilate, dreading the anger of the Emperor if he commanded 
 a wholesale massacre, had to yield, and the standards were withdrawn 
 from Jerusalem. 
 
 The power of Pilate over the people was henceforth broken. They had 
 conquered his Avill by stronger wills of their own. From this time they 
 knew how to extort concessions from him. Persistent clamour, that would 
 take no refusal, was, henceforward, their most trusted reliance, as we see 
 only too strikingly in the last hours of Jesus. But Pilate could not learn 
 by any lesson, however severe. Furious at his defeat, he resolved to hide 
 it by a fresh innovation, which he fancied he could carry out. The Eabbis 
 had contended that their law did not allow the erection of imaores, but 
 there seemed nothing to prevent votive tablets being set up in Jerusalem, 
 like those dedicated to the Emperor by other officials. He, therefore, 
 hung golden shields of this kind on the palace on Mount Zion, where he 
 lived, iuscribed simply with his own name and that of Tiberius. A 
 terrible commotion was the result. At the next feast, the Jews, with the
 
 THE ROMAN PEOCURATORS. 189 
 
 four sons of Herod, Philip, Autipas, Herod Boethos, and Phasael, at their 
 head, declared that such symbols, which were equivalent to altars, were 
 less endurable than the emblems on the standards. " Cease," cried they, 
 as he fiercely dismissed them, " to stir up war and commotion. The 
 Emperor is not honoured by insults offered to the Law. It is the will of 
 Tiberius that our laws shall be respected, but if not, show us the edict, or 
 new^ rescript, which says otherwise, that we may send an embassy re- 
 specting it to him." Pilate trembled when he heard of a complaint to 
 Tiberius, for he was afraid, as Philo tells us, that a deputation to Eome 
 would reveal all his crimes, " the venality of his sentences, his rapacity, 
 his having ruined whole families, and all the shameless deeds he had 
 done, the numerous executions he had ordered of persons who had not 
 been condemned by any tribunal, and the excess of cruelties of every kind 
 committed by him." He had gone too far, however, to retreat, and had 
 to leave matters to the decision of the Emperor ; but as Herod Antipas 
 had the ear of Tiberius, and willingly sided with the people, the procurator 
 was defeated once more. The command of Tiberius was directly against 
 him, and he was ordered to take away the shields, and hang them up in 
 the temple of Augustus, at Ctesarea. The Jews consoled themselves that 
 the Emperor was gravely offended at Pilate's folly. Henceforth, the 
 clamour of the multitude nearly always succeeded. 
 
 Before long he found himself involved in another conflict with the 
 people, in carrying out a work which was unquestionably of the highest 
 value to Jerusalem, and for which he had already obtained the sanction 
 of the Jewish authorities. The conduit which supplied the city and the 
 Temple with water, had grown ruinous from age, and Pilate undertook to 
 l)uild a grand new aqueduct, twenty-five miles in length, which should 
 bring a full and pure supply for the Temple and the citizens. As the 
 Temple was to be benefited, he naturally thought that he might defray 
 the expense from its treasury, forgetting that the money was Corban, or 
 consecrated to God. Hardly had the news of his intention spread, than, 
 at the next feast, a frantic cry rose that the Temple was to be jjlundered, 
 and thousands streamed to the palace, to repeat the tactics of Cajsarea. 
 But the procurator had this time prepared himself beforehand. He had 
 scattered numbers of his soldiers, dressed as Jews, among the crowds, 
 and no sooner had the tumultuous cries begun, than these assailed those 
 round them with clubs, and speedily drove them off in wild terror, leaving 
 many of their number, severely wounded, behind. Perhaps it was about 
 this time, when the works had been pushed almost to the Pool of Siloam, 
 that the tower, there, fell and killed eighteen men : a calamity attributed 
 hj the Eabbis to the wrath of God at the secularization of the Temple 
 treasures. Pilate's aqueduct suffered no more hindrance in its com- 
 pletion.
 
 190 THE LIFE OF CHBIST. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 HEROD A?;TIPAS AND CIIRISt's OWN COUNTRT. 
 
 OK the death of his father Herod, Gahlee fell to the lot of Herod 
 Antipas, who ruled over it during all the remaining lifetime of our 
 Lord,^and for six years after His death. His mother was the Samaritan, 
 Malthace, so that he Avas a full brother of Archelaus, who was about a 
 year older. He had been sent to Eome, for his education, with Archelaus 
 and his half-brother Philip, when a boy of about thirteen, and the three 
 had been entrusted there to the care of a private guardian. The evil 
 genius of their house, their half-brother Antipater, who was much their 
 senior, was already living in the imperial city. He had always hated 
 Archelaus and Philip, as rivals in his hopes of the throne, and now took 
 every opportunity to slander them to their father, so that, perhaps in con- 
 sequence of this, they were recalled to Judea in the year B.C. 5. But this 
 only made Antipater the more deadly in his hatred, and he succeeded in 
 so poisoning their father's mind against them, that they almost dreaded 
 sharing the fate of the two sons of Mariamne, who had fallen through the 
 same fatal influence. Antipas, who had escaped Antipater's wiles, seemed 
 likely to profit most by the misfortune, for, in his second will, made after 
 the execution of Antipater, Herod, unable to clear his mind of the pre- 
 judice against them, had passed over both Archelaus and Philip, and 
 named Antipas, the youngest, as his successor. Kindlier thoughts, how- 
 ever, returned before he actually died, and a third will was made, in which 
 Archelaus was named king, and Antipas and Philip tetrarchs, their 
 father's dominions being divided between them. 
 
 Antipas had received his name in honour of his paternal great-grand- 
 father, as Antipater, his half-brother, had received that of his grandfather- 
 In Eome, by a strange fortune, he had for a companion and fellow-scholar, 
 one whose after-life was very different from his own — a lad named 
 Manaen, who afterwards became a Christian teacher in Antioch. Antipas 
 stayed at school, in Rome, after Archelaus and Philip had been recalled to 
 Judea ; his quiet, peace-loving disposition having protected him, in some 
 measure, from the slanders of Antipater, and from the distrust of his 
 father. He was, however, by no means wanting in ability, else so shrewd 
 a man as Herod would never have thought of making him his sole 
 successor; nor could he, otherwise, have been supported, as he was, 
 before Augustus, by Salome and the family, and by the leading men of 
 Herod's government, in his suit for the crown, in preference to Archelaus. 
 That prince, hated by nearly every one, found himself vigorously opposed 
 by Antipas, and gained his cause only with mortifying abasements. 
 Salome and Herod's counsellors may have put Antipas forward to serve 
 their own ends, but he had, himself, shown in the management of his 
 claim, that, if quiet, he was none the less ambitious in a peaceful 
 way. 
 
 When he entered on his government, in the year B.C. 4, he was about 
 seventeen years old. His provinces were wide apart, for Galilee was in
 
 HEROD ANTIPAS AND CHRIST'S OWN COUNTRY. 191 
 
 the north-west, and Pevea in the south-east of the country ; the territoi-y 
 of the free towns, known as Decapolis, separating them completely. They 
 •were both, however, so rich, especially Galilee, that they ranked as second 
 in the paternal inheritance. 
 
 Under the wise guidance of his father's counsellors, Irenajus and 
 Ptolemy, the care of Antipas was first turned to the repair of his kingdom 
 — which had been sadly injured by the Romans and Arabs in the wars — 
 and to the necessary security of his throne. In the south of Galilee he 
 rebuilt and strongly fortified the town of Scpphoris,— which lay on an 
 isolated hill, only two hours north of Nazareth,— making it his capital, 
 and at once the ornament of his kingdom, and its protection against Syro- 
 Phenician, or even Roman attack. It had been taken and burned to the 
 ground by the son of the proconsul Varus, who had marched against it 
 from the neighbouring gai'rison town, Ptolemais, in the summer of the 
 year B.C. 4, on occasion of the insurrection of Judas, the son of that 
 Hezekiah whom Herod had juit to death when he routed his band in the 
 caverns of the 800 feet high cliffs of Arbela, on the Sea of Gcnnesareth. 
 Varus had sold the inhabitants as slaves, but Antipas brought others and 
 re-peopled it. Jesus, in His early childhood, must have seen the town in 
 building, for it lay, full in view, at a short distance from the hill-top 
 behind Nazareth, to which He often wandered. 
 
 Having thus secured his northern frontier, he turned to the opposite, 
 outlying extremity, where Perea bordered the Nabatean kingdom, and was 
 exposed to the Arabs, about half-way down the eastern edge of the Dead 
 Sea. Among the pi'ecipitous volcanic cliffs and peaks of that region, he 
 strengthened the fortress of Machaerus by high walls and towers, adding 
 a residence for himself within its circuit. The defences, built at first by 
 Alexander Janna3us, but destroyed by the Romans in the old Asmonean 
 wars, were now made almost impregnable, and Antipas could boast of 
 having secured his kingdom at another of its weakest points. He little 
 thought that he himself was to earn his darkest stain by the execution of 
 a lonely prisoner within its walls. But he did not trust to strong walls 
 alone. He dreaded the neighbouring A rab prin ce Aretas as his most 
 probable enemy, and allied himself with him by marrying his daughter. 
 To flatter the empress-mother, Livia, whom Salome, at her death, about 
 A.D. 10-13, had made her heir, and his neighbour, he built a town which he 
 called Livias, on the site of the old Beth Harum, at the upper end of the 
 Dead Sea. Prom Salome, Livia had obtained, besides, the town of Jamnia 
 and its district, in the Philistine plain, and Phasaelis and Archola'is in the 
 valley of the Jordan, close to the dominions of Antipas, so that he wished 
 to be on good terms with her. Besides, Livia was at the time in favour 
 with the Jews, for having given golden jars and dishes, and other costly 
 offerings to the Temple. 
 
 In the first part of his reign, under Augustus, from the year a.d. 4 to 14, 
 Antipas maintained a prudent restraint, for he had had no success in the 
 single attempt he ventured towards a more intimate relation with the 
 Emperor. On the banishment of Archclaus he had sought to become his 
 heir, and to get his father's domuiions as a whole, as had been intended in
 
 102 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 tlie second will, and seemingly had made himself chief accuser of his fallen 
 brother, and of his government. But the answer of Augustus was the 
 annexation of Judea to Syria, leaving Antipas, as his one consolation, the 
 thought tliat as he was now the only Herod, he might assume the name, 
 as he seems by his coins to have done, from this date. 
 
 His relations with Tiberius were more flattering. By countless proofs 
 of depen(^ence and obedient fidelity, shown, doubtless, in part, by treacher- 
 ous reports and espionage on the proconsuls, such as the suspicious and 
 despotic emperor loved, he succeeded at last, after a joi-obation of a good 
 many j^ears, in gaining great favour with him. To show his gratitude, 
 Antipas, who had grown tired of Sepphoris for his capital, far off among 
 the hills of Galilee, on the borders of his tetrarchy, and among a proud 
 and independent people, determined to build a new one on the Sea of Gen- 
 nesareth, near the hot springs of Emmaus. It was the finest part of his 
 territory, alike for richness of soil and beauty of landscape. The city was, 
 of course, planned in the Roman style, and as, under the former emperor, 
 every third town was called Ccesarea, or Sebaste, the Greek equivalent 
 of Augustus, the new metropolis was to be called Tiberias. The site chosen 
 was one of the most beautiful on the lake, on a southerly bend of the shore, 
 washed on its eastern side by the waves. Yet it was not, for the time, a 
 fortunate one, for the reedy strand made it unhealthy, and, still worse, 
 traces of an old burial-place were found as the streets were being laid out 
 — a discovery which at once brought forward the Eabbis with entreaties 
 that the spot might be abandoned, as thus at once unclean and unholy. 
 But Herod paid no attention to the clamour, and, as soon as some streets 
 were ready, filled the houses with whatever strangers were willing to take 
 them. Erelong, however, he had to use force to get inhabitants, for no 
 strict Jew would settle of his own accord in a place known to be polluted. 
 He was even driven to give slaves and beggars building and garden 
 ground, and to raise houses for them, and grant them special privileges, 
 before he got his capital peopled. But a prejudice clung to it, which, even 
 in after years, made all unclean for seven days after visiting it, and re- 
 quired rites of purification before the defilement could be removed. 
 Tiberias is only once mentioned in the Gosj^els, and there is no trace of 
 Jesus having ever entered it. But, in spite of all opposition, Herod ti'ans- 
 ferred his residence to it from Sepphoris, and lavishly decorated his 
 palace, to the grief of the people, with heathen ornaments. The facade, 
 which was adorned by sculptures of animals, was especially offensive to the 
 Eabbis. The interior was furnished with almost imperial splendour, and 
 it was long rei)orted how the ceilings were gilded, and what wonderful 
 candelabra and furniture of precious metal dazzled the eyes. When the 
 palace and castle were stormed by the people, at the outbreak of the final 
 war, lustres of Corinthian brass, splendid tables, and Avhole table-services 
 of solid silver, were carried off as jDlunder. Close to this castle-palace, to 
 the additional horror of the Jews, he built aii amphitheatre, still to be 
 traced, spacious enough for the greatest assemblies. The city was 
 adorned, besides, with Grecian colonnades and marble statues, and, even 
 at this day, ruins of fine buildings strew the beach — granite columns and
 
 HEROD ANTIPAS AND CIIRIST's OWN COUNTRY. 193 
 
 blocks of costly marble, porphyry, and syenite, the wreck of the splendid 
 villas of the great ones of Herod's day, when no heathen luxury had been 
 wanting. 
 
 Still, with all this Roman magnificence, the Jews were not quite for- 
 gotten. A synagogue, large enough for the greatest congregation, was 
 built, apparently by Herod, in the spacious hall of which, two generations 
 later, the wild revolutionary gatherings of the Galilteans were held during 
 tlie great war with Rome. Tlie archives of the province were transferred, 
 with the seat of government, to Tiberias, and a castle, in whose arsenals 
 arms were stored for 70,000 men, was built for the garrison. For the next 
 fifty years.. Tiberias was the undisputed capital of Galilee, and, Caesarca 
 excepted, the finest city of Palestine. Its building was the great theme 
 of local curiosity and interest in the north, for the five years after Jesus 
 had reached His majority, for it was begun between a.d. 16 and 19, and 
 was ready for inhabitants, at latest, by the year 22, and it lay only fifteen 
 or eighteen miles from Nazareth. Sepphoris was henceforth, till Nero's 
 daj's, only the second town of the province. 
 
 Galilee has a surpassing interest as the special scene of the ministry of 
 Jesus, and the district in which He spent nearly all His life. It was 
 through its cities and villages that He is recorded to have passed, once 
 and again, teaching and preaching, and it was in Galilee that He had most 
 popular support. To know something of a land whose air He thus 
 breathed so long, amongst whose people He was wont to mingle, and by 
 whose best characteristics He must have been affected, almost uncon- 
 sciously, is essential to a vivid realization of His life. 
 
 The province lay wholly inland, with Phenicia as its western, and partly 
 its northern neighbour, the small state of Ulatha reaching, from where 
 Phenicia ended, to the Sea of Merom, on the north-eastern border. The 
 Jordan marked its eastern limit, and Decapolis, with the territory of 
 Samaria, defined its southern border. Its whole extent was inconsider- 
 aljlc, for it measured little more than seven-and-twenty miles from east to 
 west, and five-and-twenty from north to south, its whole area being nearly 
 the same as that of Bedfordshire, one of the smallest of our English 
 counties. Its boundaries varied, indeed, at different times, but, at the 
 largest, it was rather like a moderate county than a province. The 
 Talmud includes Caesarea Philippi, twelve and a half miles north of the 
 Sea of Merom, in it, which would bring it in a line with the precipitous 
 mountain bed of the swift Leontes, where that river turns westward, at a 
 I'ight angle to its former course, and rushes straight to the ocean. lu 
 Christ's day, however, Caesarca Philippi seems to have belonged to the 
 dominions of Philip, rather than those of Antipas, and this was the case, 
 also, with the neighbouring district of Ulatha, though both form the 
 natural boundary of the Galilasan region. 
 
 Under these steep northern slopes extends a marshy plain, overgrown 
 with tall reeds and swamp grass, and left uninhabited, from its pestilential 
 air. South of this the waters gather to form Lake Merom, or cl Hulch, over- 
 grown with thick reeds, through which the Jordan slowly makes its way. 
 The people of Galilee never came to this district except to hunt the wild 
 
 o
 
 191 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 boar and the buffalo, which roamed through the reed beds in troops. It 
 was shunned on account of the robbers and fugitives, who were wont to 
 hide among its inaccessible morasses and reed forests. Population recom- 
 mences only when this region is passed, increasing as the point is reached 
 where the caravan road between Damascus and Acre crosses the Jordan, 
 near the spot now called Jacob's bridge, and stretches southward towards 
 Tiberias. 
 
 The Sea of Tiberias, on which that city stood, was rightly called the Eye 
 of Galilee. In the days of Christ, even more than now, all the splendour 
 of nature in southern lands was poured on its shores. Culture, which left 
 no spot unproductive, encircled the blue waters, even yet so enchanting a 
 contrast to the yellow chalk hills that mostly fringe them. Tlie western 
 shore is still bright with many-coloured vegetation, while, on the east, the 
 steep hills that sink to the water's edge are bare and gloomy volcanic 
 rocks. The richest spot on the lake is the plain of Gennesareth, where, in 
 our Lord's day, all the fruits of Palestine abounded. Even the hills were 
 then covered with trees. CyiDresses, oaks, almonds, firs, figs, cedars, cit- 
 rons, olives, myrtles, palms, and balsams, are enumerated by a contem- 
 porary of Jesus as adorning the valleys or hills. The now bare landscape 
 was then a splendid garden. Oleander bushes, with flowers of the loveliest 
 colours, figs, vines, grain-fields, and soft meadows fringed the banks, and, 
 while fruit-trees and olives covered the hills, the shores Avere dotted with 
 waving palms. 
 
 The lake is shaped almost like a pear, the broad end towards the north. 
 Its greatest width is sis and three-quarter miles, and its extreme length 
 twelve and a quarter. In Christ's day, the western shore was thickly 
 dotted with towns and villages, which the Gospels will, hereafter, bring 
 repeatedly before us. The eastern side has always been less populous, 
 but even it had towns at every opening of the dark basaltic hills, the 
 outworks of the Gaulonitish range, which press close to the water's 
 edge. 
 
 East of the Jordan, and half-way dov,ai the eastern side of the lake, a 
 strip of upland plateau, about four miles in width, and thii'teen long, was 
 included in Galilee, but it was of little value. South-west of the lake, 
 between the northern uplands and the range of Carmel, stretciied out the 
 plain of Esdraelon, the market of Galilee. Beyond other parts of the 
 province, this great plain was crowded with life, and covered with fruitful 
 fields, vineyards, and orchards, in the days of our Lord. Jewish writers 
 are never tired of praising Galilee as a whole. Its climate, they said, was 
 a well-nigh ^ocrpctual spring, its soil the most fertile in Palestine, its fruits 
 renowned for their sweetness. For sixteen miles round Sepphoris, and, 
 therefore, round Nazareth, its near neighbour, the land, it w^as boasted, 
 flowed with milk and honey. The whole province, in fact, was, and is, 
 even still, fall of verdure, and rich in shade and pleasantness ; the true 
 country of the Song of Songs, and of the lays of the well-beloved. It was 
 in a region where rich woods crowned the higher hills and mountains ; 
 where the uplands, gentle slojDes, and broader valleys, were rich in pas- 
 tui-es, cultivated fields, vineyards, olive groves, and orchards, and the palm
 
 HEROD ANTIPAS AND CHRIST's OWN COUNTRY. 195 
 
 groves of whose -warmer parts were praised even by foreigners, that Jesus 
 spent nearly all His life. 
 
 The main products of this delightful province, in the days of Christ, 
 were the fish of Gennesareth, and the wheat, wine, and olive oil, which the 
 Tv'hole land yielded so richly. Gischala, a tov/n in northci'n Galilee, owed 
 its name to the " fat soil" of its district ; and the plain of Esdraelon, on 
 part of which Nazareth looked down, was famous for its heavy crops of 
 wheat. Jesus, indeed, lived in the centre of a region famous for its 
 grain and oil. Farmers, and grape and olive-growers formed the richer 
 classes around Him, and He was familiar with noisy market days, vfhen 
 buyers came from all parts to the towns and villages, to trade for the 
 teeming rural wealth. Magdala, on the Lake of Gennesareth, drove a 
 flourishing trade in doves, for the sacrifices ; no fewer than three hundred 
 shops, it is said, being devoted to their sale. There were indigo planters 
 also in its neighbourhood, then, as now. AVoollen clothmaking and dyeing 
 throve in it, for it had eighty clothmakers, and a part of the tovni was 
 known as that of the dyers. Arbela, not far off, beside the hill caves, 
 was no less noted for its clothmaking. Flax was grown widely, and 
 woven by women into the finest kinds of linen. Kefr Hananiah — the 
 village of Hananiah — in the centre of Galilee, was the pottery district of 
 the province, and was famous for its earthenware, and especially for its 
 jars for olive oil, which were necessarily in great demand in so rich an oil 
 country. 
 
 Shut in from the sea-coast, as the Jewish territory had been in all ages, 
 the Galitean, looking down from his hills, saw, to the west, the home of 
 another and a very different race. The glittering white sand on the shore, 
 and the smoking chimneys of the glass manufactories rising from many 
 points ; the dingy buildings of Tyre, a contrast to the white walls of his 
 own mountain home, and a sign of the busy industries, the weaving, dyeing, 
 and much else which there flourished ; the ceaseless traSic, both by sea 
 and land, to and from this great centre of commerce, reminded him that the 
 Hebrew woi-ld ended with his hills, and that on the coast jilain beneath them 
 that of the Greco-Phenician race began. Yet, there were many cities, and 
 market towns, and villages, in his own hills and valleys— Gischala on the 
 northern slopes of the 4,000 feet high Djebel Djermak, and Eama on the 
 southern ; Sepphoris crowning its hill of 900 feet ; the strong hill fortress 
 of Jotapata, overlooking the plain of Eattauf on the north side of the 
 ISTazareth ridge; with Cana of Galilee on its northern edge, and Rimmon 
 on its southern. All these, or the heights under which they nestled, were 
 every-day sights to Jesus from the round sximmit behind His own highland 
 Nazareth, and they were only a few that might be named. Looking south, 
 over the plain of Esdraelon, on its further edge lay Legio, the old Megiddo, 
 where the good king Josiah fell in battle, amidst such slaughter and lamen- 
 tation, that Zechariah, more than a hundred years later, could find no 
 better picture of " the land mourning, every family apart," than the 
 " mourning in the valley of Megiddon," and that even the Apocalypse 
 places the great final conflict, in Armageddon, — the Hill of Megiddo. The 
 windings of the torrent Kishon carried with it the memories of another
 
 196 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 great historical battle, when the host of Sisera, thrown helpless by a 
 sudden flood, perished before Barak and Deborah. In the east of the plain 
 rose, on its slope, the pleasant Jezreel, once Ahab's ca]iital, where Naboth 
 had his vineyard, and the dogs licked the blood of the hanghty Jezebel. 
 Clustered round a spur of the hills of Gilboa, which rose 1,800 feet above 
 the sea-level, halfway between Jezreel and Tabor, lay, on the different 
 sides, the villaore of Suncm, Avhere Elisha lived Avith the Shunammite 
 widow, and the birthplace of Abishag, the fairest maiden in the kingdom of 
 David — ISTain, where the young man was one day to rise up again, alive, 
 from his bier— and Endor — "the fountain of the people round" — where 
 Saul saw the shade of Samuel. Close to the hill, on its southern side, 
 bubbling up in a hollow of the rock, was the Spring of Trembling, where 
 Gideon's test sent away all but the stout-hearted three hundred who won 
 the great " day of Midian," the prophetic prototype of the triumph of the 
 " Prince of Peace." On the south side of the ravine down which the spring 
 flowed, rose the hills of Gilboa, where Saul and his three sons fell in 
 battle. Where the rocky gorge, sinking steeply, opens a few miles beyond, 
 to the east, into a pleasant mountain valley, watered by Gideon's spring, 
 now swollen to a brook, lay the town of Bethshean or Scythopolis, to the 
 walls of which the bodies of Saul and of his three sons, Jonathan among 
 them, were hung up in triumph by the victorious Philistines. 
 
 The view from the ISTazareth hills swept over all this landscape, but it 
 embraced much more. Josephus says that there were two hundred and 
 forty towns and villages in Galilee, and fifteen fortresses. Tabor, Sep- 
 phoris, and Jotapata, were among them, in Christ's own district, and Safed 
 and Ca3sarea Philippi within the sweep of His view. St. Mark speaks of 
 towns, villages, and farmhouses on the Galitean hill-sides. Not a spot of 
 ground was left idle, and the minute division of the soil, from the dense 
 population, had caused the plough often to give way to the spade. 
 Pasture land was turned into fields, as more profitable than cattle or even 
 flocks, which were left to graze the mountains of Syria, and the barren hills 
 of Judea. The rich dark soil of Esdraelon bore magnificent Indian corn 
 and wheat, and the hill-sloi^es on its sides were noted for their wine, and 
 the rich yield of their olive gardens and vineyards. The Rabbis, in their 
 hyperbolical way, say that one waded in oil in Galilee. " It never suffers 
 from want of people," saj^s Josephus, " for its soil is rich, with trees of all 
 kinds on it, and its surpassing fertility yields a splendid return to the 
 farmer. The ground is worked with the greatest skill, and not a spot left 
 idle. The ease with which life is supported in it, moreover, has over- 
 spread it with towns and well-peopled villages, many of them strongly 
 fortified. The smallest has over fifteen thousand inhabitants." The ease 
 with which Josephus levied 100,000 Galilasan troops seems to indicate a 
 population of, perhaps, two millions, and the general prosperity is shown 
 in the readiness with which Herod raised a Eoman contribution of 100 
 talents in Galilee, as compared with Judea. 
 
 The pictures in the Gospels support this description. Everywhere the 
 scene is fall of life. Busy labour enlivens the vineyard, or ploughs the 
 field, or digs the garden. In the towns, building is going on vigorously :
 
 THE GALILEANS AND THE BORDER LANDS. 197 
 
 the extra mill-stone lies ready beside the mill : the bams are filled and 
 new ones about to be built : vineyards stretch along the ten-aced hillsides, 
 and outside the town are seen the whitewashed stones of the cemeteries. 
 On the roads, and beside the hedges, the blind and cripple await the gifts 
 of passers-by : labourers are being hired in the market-places, and the 
 farm servant wends homewards in the evening with his plough : the songs 
 and dance of light-hearted youth on the village green are heard from a 
 distance : the children play and strive in open places of the towns : visitors 
 knock at closed doors even late in the night : and the drunken upper 
 servant storms at and maltreats the maids. From morninoj to nisjht the 
 hum of many-coloured lusty life everywhere rises : the busy crowds have 
 no time to think about higher things. One has bought a field and naust 
 go to see it, another has to prove a new yoke of oxen, and a third has some 
 other business — a feast, a marriage, or a funeral. To use our Lord's words, 
 they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded, 
 they married wives and were given in marriage, as full of the world in 
 its ambitions, cai'es, labours and pleasures, as if the little moment of their 
 lives vv'ere to last for ever. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 THE GALILjEANS AND THE BORDER LANDS. 
 
 GALILEE got its name as the circle or region of the Gentile nations, 
 and hence, to the southern Jews of Isaiah's days, it was "the 
 heathen country." It included the districts assigned to Asher, ISTaphtali, 
 Zebulon, and Issachar. But these tribes never obtained entire possession 
 of their territories, and contented themselves with settling among the 
 Canaanite jiopulatiou, whom they, in some cases, made tributary, — the 
 Jewish colonies remaining centres of Judaism in places which retained 
 their old heathen names. Kedesh in Naphtali, near Lake Merom, the 
 birthplace of Earak, with twenty small cities lying round it, was, 
 originally, " tne land of Galilee " in Joshua's time, and in the days of the 
 kings, from the population mainly belonging to the neighbouring Phenicia; 
 but the mixed character of the people, which was a necessary consequence 
 of Galilee being a border-land, extended the name, in the end, to the whole 
 of the province. Even in Solomon's time the population was mixed. The 
 hilly district, called Cabul — " dry, sandy, unfruitful " — which he gave to 
 Hiram, king of Tyre, as a niggardly return for service rendered in the 
 building of the Temple, contained twenty towns, inhabited chiefly by 
 Phenicians, but was so worthless that Hiram, in contemptnous ridicule, 
 playing on the name of the district, called it, in Phenician, Chabalon — 
 " good for nothing." The separation from the House of David, and from 
 Jerusalem, under the kings of Israel, and the Assyrian captivity at a 
 later date, further affected the northern poj)ulation. To the prophet 
 Isaiah they were the people " that walked in darkness and dwelt in the 
 laud of the shadow of death," alike from their separation from Jerusalem,
 
 198 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 their living among the heathen, and their national calamities, though he 
 anticipates a bright future for them in the light of the Messiah. After 
 the exile two great changes took place. Jewish colonists gradually spread 
 over the land once more, and the name Galilee was extended to the whole 
 north on this side of the Jordan, so that the territory of the tribe of 
 Issachar, with the plain of Esdraelon ; Zebulon, with the southern part 
 of the Sea of Gennesareth ; and ISTaphtali, and Aslier, were included in it. 
 The new Jewish settlers had no longer any political jealousy of Jerusalem, 
 and once more frequented the Temple, while the fact that they were 
 surrounded by heathen races made them, perliaps, more loyal to Judaism 
 than they otherwise would have been ; just as the Protestants of Ireland 
 are more intensely Protestant because surrounded by Romanism. Still, 
 though faithful, their land was "defiled" by heathen citizens and neigh- 
 bours, and the narrow bigotry of Judea looked askance at it from this 
 cause. Besides Jews, it had not a few Phenicians, Syrians, Arabs, and 
 Greeks settled in it. Carmel had become almost a Syrian colony, and 
 Kedesh retained the mixed population it had had for ages, while the 
 eastern end of the Esdraelon valley was barred to the Jew by the Gentile 
 town of Scythopolis, — the ancient Bethshean. Moreover, the great caravan 
 road, from Damascus to Pfcolemais, which ran over the hills from Caper- 
 naum, through the heart of Galilee, brouglit many heathen into the 
 country. The great ti'ansport of goods employed such numbers of them, 
 as camel drivers, hostlers, labourers, conductors, and the like, that the 
 towns facing the sea were little different from those of Phenicia. Thus 
 Zebulon is described as "a town with many very fine houses, as good as 
 those of Tyre, or Sidon, or Berytus." The places created or beautified by 
 the Herods in Roman style, could hardly have been so if the population 
 had been strict Jews. The attempt to build heathen cities like Tiberias, 
 or the restored Sepphoris, Avould have excited an insurrection in Judea, 
 but the less narrow Galilreans allowed Antipas to please his fancy; nor 
 was there ever, apparently, such a state of feeling caused by all his Roman 
 innovations as was roused by the amphitheatre at Jerusalem alone. 
 Separated by Samaria from the desolate hills of Judea, the home of the 
 priests and Rabbis, the Galila^ans were less soured by the sectarian sjDirit 
 paramount thei-e, and less hardened in Jewish orthodoxy, while, in many 
 respects, they had caught the liberal influences round them in the north. 
 Hence their Judaism was less exclusive and narrow than that of, pei^haps, 
 any other section of the Jewish world. 
 
 But though less bigoted than their southern brethren, the GalilaDan 
 Jews were none the less faithful to the Law. They frequented the feasts 
 at Jerusalem in great numbers, and were true to their synagogues, and to 
 the hopes of Israel. Pharisees and " doctors of the Law " were settled in 
 every town, and their presence implies an equally wide existence of syna- 
 gogues. In the south, tradition was held in supreme honour, but in 
 Galilee the people kept by the Law. In Jerasalem the Rabbis introduced 
 refinements and changes, but the Galilgeans would not tolerate novelties. 
 Our Lord's wide knowledge of Scripture, His reverence for the Law, and 
 His scoi'u of tradition, were traits of His countrymen as a race.
 
 THE GALILEANS AND THE BOEDER LAND J. 199 
 
 Nor did tbeir forbearance, in the presence of heathen fashions and ways 
 of thought, affect their morals for evil, any more than their religion. lu 
 many respects these "vvere stricter than those of Judea : much, for example, 
 was forbidden in Galilee, in the intercourse of the sexes, which was allowed 
 at Jerusalem. Their religion was freer, but it was also deeper ; they had 
 less of the form, but more of the life. 
 
 "Cowardice," says Josephus, "was never the fault of the Galilgeans. 
 They are inured to war from their infancy, nor has the country ever been 
 wanting in great numbers of brave men." The mountain air they breathed 
 made them patriots, but their patriotism was guided by zeal for their 
 faith. While warmly loyal to Herod, in gratitude for his subduing the 
 lawless bands who had wasted their country, after the civil wars, — and 
 quiet and well-disposed to Antipas, during the forty-three years of his 
 reign, they were none the less fixed in their abhorrence of Kome, the 
 heathen tyrant of their race. In revolt after revolt they were the first to 
 breast the Eoman armies, and they were the last to defend the ruins of 
 Jerusalem, stone by stone, like worthy sons of those ancestors who 
 "jeopardised their lives unto the death in the high places of the field." 
 There were families like that of the Zealot Hezekia,h, and Judas the 
 Galilasan, in whom the hatred of Eome was handed down from father to 
 children, and which, in each generation, furnished martyrs to the national 
 cause. A hundred and fifty thousand of the youth of Galilee fell in the 
 last struggle with Eome, and few narratives are more stirring than the 
 defence of the Galila:an fortresses, one after another, in the face of all odds. 
 Even Titus appealed to the magnificent heroism of these defenders of their 
 freedom and their country, to rouse the ardour of his own army. ISTor 
 was their devotion to their leaders less admirable. Josephus boasts of 
 the heartiness and trust the Galila;ans reposed in him. Though their 
 towns were destroyed in the war, and their wives and children carried off, 
 they were more concerned for the safety of their general than for their 
 own troubles. 
 
 The Jew of the south, wrapped in self-importance, as living in or near 
 the holy city, amidst the schools of the Eabbis, and under the shadow of 
 the Temple, and full of religious pride in his assumed superior knowledge 
 of the Law, and greater purity as a member of a community nearly wholly 
 Jewish, looked down on his Galila3an brethren. The very ground he trod 
 was more holy tha.n the soil of Galilee, and the repugnance of the North 
 to adopt the prescrijjtions of the Eabbis was, itself, a ground of estrange- 
 ment and self-exaltation. He could not believe that the Messiah could 
 come from a part so inferior, for " the Law was to go forth from Ziou, 
 and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem." Jesus found willing hearers 
 and many disciples in the cities and towns of Galileo, but He made little 
 impression on Judea. 
 
 Yet, Galilee, from the earliest times, had vindicated its claims to honour, 
 for the intellectual vigour of its people. Not only physically and morally, 
 but even in mental freshness and force, it was before the narrow and 
 morljid south, v/hich had given itself up to the childish trifling of Eab- 
 binism. The earliest poeti'y of Israel rose among the Galikran hills, when
 
 200 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Barak of Naplitali had tfiumplied over the Cauaanites. Tlic Song of 
 Songs was composed in Galilee by a poet of nature, whose heart and eyes 
 drank in the inspiration of the bright sky and the opening flowers, and 
 who could tell how the fig-tree put forth its leaves, and the vine sprouted, 
 and the pomegranate opened its blossoms. Hosea, the prophet, belonged 
 to Issachar; Jonah to Zebulon; ISTahum came from Elkosh in Galilee; 
 and in the Gospels a noble band of Galilseans group themselves round the 
 central figure— Peter, the brave and tender-hearted — James and John — 
 Andrew and Philip — and ISTathanael, of Cana, not to speak of others, or of 
 the women of Galilee, who honoured themselves by ministering to Christ 
 of their substance. It was from Galilee, moreover, that the family of the 
 great Apostle of the heathen emigrated to Tarsus, in Oilicia, for they 
 belonged to Gischala, a Galila3an town, though their stock originally was 
 of the tribe of Benjamin. 
 
 The Talmud sketches, in a few words, the contrast between the two 
 provinces — " The Galilasan loves honour, and the Jewnioney." The Eabbis 
 admit that the Galilajans, in their comparative poverty, were temperate, 
 pure, and religious. Their fidelity to their faith was shown by their fond 
 and constant visits to the Temple, in spite of the hostile Samaritan 
 territory between, and it was through their zeal that the Passover was 
 celebrated for eight days instead of seven. "When Christ appeared, they 
 threw the same ardour and fidelity into His service. In their midst the 
 Saviour, persecuted elsewhere, took constant refuge. They threw open 
 their land to Him, as a safe shelter from the rage of the Jews, almost to 
 the last. He went forth from among them, and gathered the first-fruits 
 of His kingdom from them, and it was to a band of Galilgeans that He 
 delivered the commission to spread the Gospel through the world, after 
 His death. 
 
 The district of Perea, on the east of the Jordan, was included, with 
 Galilee, in the section ruled over by Herod Antipas, and was the scene, 
 in part, of the ministry, first of John the Baptist, and then of Jesus. It 
 was larger than Galilee, extending, north and south, from the city of Pella, 
 to the fortress of Machaerus — that is, from opj^osite Scythopolis, half-way 
 down the Dead Sea — and, east and west, from the Jordan to Philadelphia, 
 the ancient Eabbath Ammon. It was thus about seventy-five miles in 
 length, by, perhaps, thirty in breadth, though the boundaries seem to have 
 varied at different times. It was much less fertile than Galilee. " The 
 greater part of it," says Josephus, "is a desert, rough, and much less 
 suitable for the finer kinds of fruits than Galilee. In other parts, however, 
 it has a moist soil, and produces the widest variety, and its plains are 
 planted with trees of all sorts ; though the olive, the vine, and the palm- 
 tree are cultivated most. It is well watered in these parts with torrents, 
 which flow from the mountains, and are never dry, even in summer." 
 Towards the deserts, which hemmed it in along its eastern edge, lay the 
 hill fortress and town Gerasa, 1,800 feet above the sea level. It was on 
 the caravan road through the mountains, from Bozra, a place of consider- 
 able trade; while its magnificent ruins yet show that, in Christ's day, it 
 was the finest city of the Dccapolis. Two hundred and thirty pillars, still
 
 THE GALILEANS AND THE BOEDEB LANDS. 201 
 
 standing, aud tlie wreck of its pilljlic buildings, — baths, theatres, temples, 
 cii'cus, and forum, and of a triumphal arch — make it easy to recall its 
 former splendour. The line of the outer walls cau be easily traced. From 
 the triumphal arch, outside the city, a long street passes through the city 
 gate to the forum, still skirted by fifty-seven Ionic columns. Colonnades 
 adorned mile after mile of the streets, which crossed at right angles, like 
 those of an American town. 
 
 It must have been a gay, as well as a busy and splendid scene, when 
 Jesus passed through the country on His Pcrcan journeys. 
 
 But the tide of civilized life has ebbed, and left Gerasa without an 
 inhabitant for many centuries. 
 
 About twenty-five miles south of Gerasa, and, like it, between twenty 
 and thirty miles east of the Jordan, lay Philadelphia. It was the old 
 capital of Amnion, and in Christ's day, the southern frontier post against 
 the Arabs. Though tAVO thousand five hundred feet above the sea, it 
 sheltered itself in two narrow valleys, each brightened by flov/ing streams 
 — the upland " city of the waters," with hills rising on all sides round it. 
 The main stream, faced with a long stone quay; terraces rising above, 
 lined by rows of pillars ; the citadel, seen far and near, on a height be- 
 tween the two valleys, give us a glimpse of it. The old city which Joab 
 besieged, and where Uriah fell, had given place to a Roman one. Fine 
 temples, theatres, and public and private buildings, long ruined, were then 
 alive with motley throngs, but the whole scene has now, for ages, been 
 utterly deserted, and rank vegetation rises in its long silent streets, and in 
 the courts of its temples and mansions. 
 
 Hesbon, about fifteen miles nearly south of Ammon, on the Roman road 
 which ran from Damascus, through Bozra aud Ammon,— branching from 
 Hesbon, west, to Jericho, and south, to Edom, — was the third and last 
 frontier town of Perea. It lay among the Pisgah mountains, three thou- 
 sand feet above the level of the sea, amidst brown hills, fretted with bright 
 green lines along the course of numerous streamlets, oozing from the lime- 
 stone rocks. Its ruins lie in great confusion, and serve only to tell of 
 wealth and prosperity long since passed away. In the valley below, a 
 great volume of water gushing from the rock, once filled the famous pools 
 of Hesbon, — to the v/riter of the Song of Songs, like the laughing eyes of 
 his beloved. From Hesbon, the eye ranges over a wide table-land of un- 
 dulating downs, bright with flowers, or rough with prickly shrubs, seamed 
 with gorges sinking abruptly towards the Jordan, and noisy with foaming 
 streams which leap from ledge to ledge in their swift descent, between 
 banks hidden by rank vegetation. 
 
 These three towns lie on the outer edge of the lofty plateau, east of the 
 Jordan, where the long wall of the limestone hills of Gilead and Ammon 
 begins to sink towards the desert. On the western edge of the plateau 
 itself, nearer the Jordan, and at the north of the district, lay^ella, on a low 
 flat hill, only 2-50 feet above the sea-level ; rich in living waters, and em- 
 bosomed in other higher hills. Built as a military post, by veterans of 
 Alexander's army, it bore the name of their old Macedonian capital. It 
 was afterwards famous as the retreat of the Christians before the fall of
 
 202 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 Jerusalem ; and as the lioiiie of the relations of Christ, the last of whom 
 died as fifteenth bishop of the local church. The storm of the great vv^ar, 
 which wasted Perea on every side, passed harmlessly by Pella, leaving it 
 and the infant Church untouched. With v/hat fond regards must Jesus 
 have often looked from across the Jordan, on the spot which one day was 
 to shelter His servants. 
 
 North of Pella, twelve hundred feet above the sea-level, on the edge of 
 the deeo cleft through which the Hieromax flows to the Sea of Tiberias, 
 stood Gadara, a place famous in Christ's day for its hot sulphurous baths. 
 It had been rebuilt by Pompey, after having lain for a time in ruins, and 
 gloried in its streets paved with basalt, its colonnades of Corinthian pillars, 
 and its massive buildings in Eoman style, amidst which Jesus may have 
 walked, — for it was in the neighbourhood of this town that He cured the 
 two men possessed with devils. Numerous tombs hewn in the hills around, 
 still illustrate a striking feature of the Gospel narratives. 
 
 Gadara and Pella are both on the western side of the long range of 
 the mountains of Gilead — the old territory of Eeuben and Gad— which 
 stretch along the eastern side of the Jordan valley, till they merge in the 
 Pisgah range at the north of the Dead Sea. Rocky glens and valleys, 
 whose lower slopes are often terraced for vines ; rolling highlands, for the 
 most part clothed with forests of ilex, oak, and terebinth; open plains and 
 meadows ; rushing streams, fringed with rich vegetation ; still justify the 
 choice of the two tribes. The limestone hills are identical with those of 
 western Palestine, but the abundance of water makes the whole region 
 much richer. Jesus must often have wandered amidst its wheat fields, 
 olive grounds, vineyards, and fig and pomegranate orchards, and under its 
 leafy forests,— for He once and again visited these districts. The road 
 stretches north from the ford of the Jordan, near Jericho, up the green 
 Wady Scha'ib to Ramoth Gilead, 2,700 feet above the sea, past Djebel 
 Oscha, the hill of the prophet Hosea, 800 feet higher, to Wady Zerka, the 
 ancient river Jabbok — thence to the heights of Kala'at er Robod, where 
 Saladin in after days built a castle. Resting here, Christ's eye would range 
 over Palestine far and near, from the north end of the Dead Sea, along the 
 whole Jordan valley, the river gleaming occasionally in its windings. Part of 
 the Sea of Galilee would be before Him to the north, p.nd, to the west, Ebal 
 and Gerizim, with Mount Tabor, and the ridge of Carmel stretching into 
 the misty distance, beyond the wide plain of Esdraelon. Towards the 
 north. He would see the hills of Safed, across the sea of Galilee, ani far 
 away, in the blue haze, the snow- sprinkled peaks of Hermon. From this 
 point His road Avould lie through Pella, across the Jordan, on the western 
 side of which the steep gorge of the Wady Farrah led up to the plain of 
 Esdraelon and his own district. 
 
 With the mountains of Pisgah, on the east of the Dead Sea, a wild in- 
 accessible region begins, counting among its peaks Beth Peer, from which 
 Balaam once blessed Israel, as it lay encamped below in the open meadows 
 opposite Jericho, and where Antipas, in Christ's day, built the town of 
 Livias, in honour of the Empress-mother. Mount Nebo, where Moses was 
 buried in an unknown grave, and the summit from which he surveyed the
 
 THE GALILiEAKS AND THE EOEDER LANDS. 203 
 
 laud he was not to enter, are in this range, and it was in a cave m their 
 sechided valleys, that Jewish tradition believed Jeremiah to have hidden 
 the ark, and the sacred vessels of the Temple, till the coming of the 
 Messiah, in a secrecy known only to God and the angels. 
 
 The Jewish population in Perea was only small, the heathen element 
 greatly prevailing. In the northern parts, the Syrian races were in the 
 majority ; in the southern, the people were largely Arab. 
 
 The cities were in most cases independent, with a district belonging to 
 each of them, and thus, though in the territories of Anti^Das, were not part 
 of his dominions. Under the name of the Decapolis, — " the ten cities,"— 
 Philadelphia, Gadara, Hippos, Damascus, Raphana, Dio, Pella, Gcrasa, and 
 Kanatha, were confederated, iinder direct Roman government, with Scj'tho- 
 polis, on the west side of the Jordan, in a league of peace and war against 
 native robber bands and the Bedouin hordes ; and this made them virtu- 
 ally a distinct state. Antipas, apparently, had only so much of the district 
 as did not belong to these cities. 
 
 Above Perea, in Christ's day, the tetrarchy of Philip reached to the 
 slopes of Hermon on the north, and away to the desert on the east. 
 It included the provinces of Gaulonitis, Iturea, Trachonitis, Auranitis, and 
 Batanea. 
 
 Gaulonitis — still known as Golan — reached from Ctesarea Philippi, or 
 Panias, on the slopes of Mount Hermon, to the Hieromax, at the south of 
 the Sea of Galilee, stretching back twenty or thirty miles in barren up- 
 lands of volcanic origin, to the green pastures of Batanea or Bashan, the 
 oasis of the region, with the district of Iturea on its north, the lava jilateau 
 of Trachonitis on its east, and the equally waste tract of Auranitis, or the 
 Hauran, on the south. Gaulonitis, which we know Jesus to have visited, 
 looked over towards Galilee from a range of hills running parallel v/ith 
 the Jordan, north and south ; a second and third ridge rising behind, in 
 their highest peaks, to the height of 4,000 feet. Besides Cajsarea Philippi, 
 at its extreme north, the province boasted the town of Bcthsaida, rebuilt 
 by Philip, and called Julius, after the daughter of Augustus. It lay in a 
 green opening at the upper end of the Lake of Galilee. On the hills over- 
 looking the lake, towards its sovithern end, lay the town of Gamala, and in 
 the valley at the south extremity was Hippos, one of the cities of the 
 Decapolis. 
 
 Iturea — north of Gaulonitis, on the lower slojies of Hermon — was a 
 region of inaccessible mountain fastnesses, and intricate defiles, which 
 favoured and helped to perpetuate the lawlessness which the first settlers 
 may have derived from their Arab ancestor. In the south it has a rich 
 soil, watered by numerous streams from Hermon, but the north is a wild 
 region of jagged rocks, heaped up in uttermost confusion, or yawning in 
 rents and chasms. The Itureans, fonder of plunder than industry, had, 
 till Herod tamed them, an evil name, as mere robbers, issuing from their 
 savage retreats to prey upon the caravans jiassing from Damascus to the 
 Sea. " The hills," says Strabo, " are inhabited by Itureans and Arabs, 
 who are mere hordes of robbers ; the j^lains by a farming population, who 
 are constantly plundered by the hill people, and thus always need help
 
 204 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 from outside." Gathering in the recesses of Lebanon and Hermon, the 
 mountain banditti organized raids as far as Sidon and Berytus on the 
 coast, and to the gates of Damascus on the east. Famous as archers and 
 bold riders, they were largely enrolled in the Koman army, in which their 
 skill became TDroverbial ; but the legions, nevertheless, looked askance at 
 them as the worst set in the service. Their boundaries varied, like their 
 fortune in war, and hence are seldom described alike. 
 
 Trachonitis was the name given to the district east and south of 
 Iturea, though the two seem, at times, to be interchangeable names for 
 nearly the same region. Iturea often embraces the tract usually known 
 as Trachonitis, the " Argob," or " Stony," of the Bible; Trachonitis being 
 apparently a mere translation of this older name. It was part of the king- 
 dom of Og, conquered by the Israelites before they entered Canaan, and was 
 assigned to the half tribe of Manasseh. Extending about twenty-two miles 
 from north to south, and fourteen from east to west, it marks the focus of 
 ancient volcanic energy in the district. It is a vast ocean of basalt, cracked 
 and rent into innumerable fissures in cooling, and offering in its countless 
 chasms an almost impenetrable shelter to whole armies. " In its rough, 
 and almost inaccessible rocks," says Strabo, " are hidden spaces in which 
 a thousand men could assemble for a foray against the merchants of 
 Damascus." The chief town, Kanatha, on the caravan route, belonged to the 
 Decapolis, and was protected from tlie robber population around by strong 
 Roman fortifications. As a whole, it was a terribly wild region. "The 
 inhabitants of the country," says Josephus, " live in a mad way, and pillage 
 the districts of the Damascenes, their rulers at times sharing the plunder. 
 It is hard to restrain them, for robbery has long been their profession, 
 and they have no other way of living, for they have neither any city of 
 their own, nor any lands, but only some holes or dens of the earth, where 
 they and their cattle live together. They contrive, however, to secure 
 water, and store corn in granaries, and are able to make a great resistance 
 by sudden sallies, for the entrances of tlieir caves are so narrow, that only 
 one iDerson can enter at a time, though they are incredibly large within. 
 The ground over their habitations is not very high, but rather a plain, 
 while the rocks are very difficult of entrance without a guide." Herod 
 did his trtmost against them, but his success was only passing, till at last 
 he settled several military colonies in the district, and by their incessant 
 patrols managed to keep the robbers in check. 
 
 South of this fierce and lawless region lay Auranitis, now known as the 
 Hauran, a high plateau of treeless downs, of the richest soil, stretching 
 from Gilead to the Desert, and from the Ledja to the uplands of Moab on 
 the south. Not a stone is to be seen, and the great caravans of well-fed 
 camels, laden with corn and barley, constantly met with on the way to 
 Damascus, show what it must have been in the days of Christ. Even now, 
 however, no one can travel through it safely, unarmed, and the fellahin, 
 except close to towns, have to plough and soav with a musket slung at 
 their back. It is the granary of Damascus, and the ruins of numerous 
 towns, built of basalt, even to the doors of the houses, show that the popu- 
 lation must have been great.
 
 THE GALILEANS AND THE BOKDEE LANDS. 205 
 
 Batanea, the auciout Baslian, was a mountainous district of -.lie richest 
 type, abounding iu forests of evergreen oaks, and extremely rich in its soih 
 The hills, which, in some cases, reach a height of 6,000 feet, and the cattle 
 which fed in the rich meadows, ara often alluded to in the Old Testament. 
 Desolate now, it was densely peopled eighteen hundred years ago, as the 
 ruins of towns and cities of basalt, as in Auranitis, thickly strewn over its 
 surface, and still almost as perfect as when they were built, strikingly 
 prove. 
 
 In the lifetime of Christ, a large Jewish population lived in all these 
 districts, in the midst of much larger numbers of Syrians, Arabs, Greeks, 
 and Phenicians, under the rule of Philip^ the son of Herod and of Cleopatra 
 of Jerusalem. He was between Archelaus and Antipas in age, and had 
 been educated with them in Eome, but kept entirely aloof from family 
 intrigues, and was true-hearted enough to plead the cause of Archelaus 
 before Augustus. The best of Herod's sons, he retained not only the 
 good- will of his family, but was held in high esteem by the Eomans, and 
 the Jews especially honoured him as sprung from a daughter of Zion, and 
 no son of a Samaritan. During a reign of thirty-seven years, he was no 
 less gentle to his subjects than peaceful towards his neighbours. " He 
 showed himself," says Josephus, "moderate and quiet in his life and 
 government. He constantly lived in the country subject to him, and used 
 to travel through it, continually, to administer justice; his official seat— 
 the sella curulis — acconnjanying him everj-where ; always ready to be set 
 down in the market place, or the road, to hear complaints, without any one 
 suffering from delay." His court consisted only of a few friends, whom 
 he seldom changed, and it is recorded of him, that in his care for his people 
 he levied almost fewer taxes than he needed. Modest in his ambitions, he 
 cared more for the jDeaceful triumph of discovering the sources of the 
 Jordan than for noisy fame. The neighbourhood of the romantic city he 
 built on the edge of Hermon was the scene of the transfiguration ; but he 
 is not mentioned in the Gospels, though it is a noble tribute to him that 
 Jesus once and again took refuge in his territories, from the ci'aft of His 
 own ruler, Antipas, and the hate of the Galileean Pharisees. He married 
 his niece Salome, daughter of Herod-Philip, his uncrowned brother, and of 
 the too well-known Herodias. His reign continued through the whole life 
 of our Lord, and he finally died childless, a year or so after the Cruci- 
 fixion, in Bethsaida, or Julias, on the Lake of Galilee, and was laid in a 
 tomb which he himself had built as his last resting-place. 
 
 On the southern side of the plain of Esdraelon, the country rises again 
 into rounded hills, which extend from the great coast plain, across the 
 deep chasm of the Jordan, till they sink away in the east, while towards 
 the south they end only in the wilderness of et Tih, or the "Wanderings. 
 The northern part of these hills, on the west of the Jordan, was the land 
 of the Samaritans. Their country began at En Gannim — " the fountain of 
 gardens " — at the south end of Esdraelon, and ended, in the south, at the 
 mountain pass of Akrabbi — or, the " Scorpions," north of Shiloh. The 
 whole region is a network of countless valleys running in every direction, 
 but mainly east and west.
 
 206 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 In tliese valleys lived the descendants of the heathen colonics, which 
 Esarhaddon had sent to occupy the place of the Ten Tribes whom he had 
 carried away, and, with them, the children of such of these tribes them- 
 selves as escaped deportation, or had found their w^ay back, and of Jews 
 who had fled thither from time to time, from any cause, from Judea. • The 
 growth of the new Jewish kingxlom on the south had encroached greatly 
 on the Samaritan territory, but it was still a desirable land, and far more 
 fruitful than Judea itself. 
 
 The soft limestone or chalky hills of Samaria, unlike those farther 
 south, are not without many springs. Fertile bottoms of black earth are 
 not infrequent, and rich fields, gardens, and orchards, alternate in the 
 valleys, wliile vineyards and trees of difi:erent kinds spread up the slopes, 
 and vfoods of olives and walnut crown the soft outline of many of the hills. 
 The meadow^s and pasture land of Samaria w^ere famous in Israel. 
 
 Such was the territory which lay between Christ in Galilee, and the 
 hills of Judea. Of the people, I shall have occasion to speak at a future 
 time. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 BEFORE THE DAWN. 
 
 "VTO power ever showed so great a genius for assimilating conquered 
 -^^ nations to itself as Rome. Its tributary provinces habitually merged 
 their national life, ere long, in that of their conqueror. Her laws, 
 language, and religion, more or less completely took root wherever her 
 eagles were perm^anently planted, and have left the records of their 
 triumphs in the wide extent of the so-called Latin race, even at this day. 
 But it w^as very different in Palestine. There Rome met a state of things 
 unknown elsewhere ; which she neither cared, nor was able to comprehend. 
 The Spaniard or Gaul had given no trouble after he was once subdued, 
 but readily accepted her arts, civilisation, and laws. It was reserved for 
 the mountaineers of Judea to refuse any peaceable relations to the mistress 
 of the world ; to treat her proudest sons with haughty contempt, and to 
 regard their very presence in the country as a defilement. 
 
 The discipline of the centuries before the Roman concjuest of Palestine 
 by Pompey, had formed a nation every way unique. The religious institu- 
 tions of its ancestors had become the object of a passionate idolatry, which 
 claimed, and willingly received, the whole of life for its service. The 
 tragedy of the Exile, the teaching of the leaders of the Return, and of their 
 successors, and the fierce puritanism kindled by the Syrian persecutionii, 
 and deepened by the Maccab^an struggle, had formed a peoj^le whoso 
 existence w^as interwoven with that of their law ; who would endure any 
 torture, or let themselves be thrown to beasts in the circus, rather than 
 alter a word which their law forbade — whose women would bear the 
 agonies of martyrdom rather than eat unclean food, and whose men would 
 submit to be cut down without an attempt at resistance, rather than touch
 
 BEFOEE THE DAWN. 207 
 
 the sword on a Sabbath. Their whole life was a succession of rites and 
 observances, as sacred in their eyes as the details of his caste to a Brahmin. 
 Intercourse with other nations was possible only to the most limited ex- 
 tent. They shrank from all otlier races as from foulness or leprosy. The 
 common Jew shunned a heathen or Samaritan ; the Pharisee shrank from 
 the common Jew; the Essene ascetic withdrew from mankind into the 
 desert. The dread of ceremonial defilement made solitude the only 
 security, till the desire for it became morbid, like that of the Samaritan 
 settlers of the islands of the Ked Sea, who implored any stranger to keep 
 at a distance. The very country consecrated by so many purifications was 
 sacred, and hence there could be no greater shock to the feelings of the 
 nation than that any who were ceremonially unclean should pollute it by 
 their presence. Even among themselves, constant care was required to 
 maintain or restore their purity ; but the presence of heathen among them 
 made daily defilement almost inevitable. What, then, must have been the 
 horror of the nation when even the Holy of Holies, which the high priest 
 alone could enter, and that only once a year, after endless purifications, 
 was polluted by Pompey, and when, as in the days of the Prophet, that 
 name which a Jew dared not even utter, was blasphemed every day by the 
 heathen soldiery ? The cry of the Psalmist in times long past, was once 
 more that of every Jew, " God, the heathen are come into Thine inherit- 
 ance : Thy Holy Temple have they defiled." 
 
 Such a calamity could be regarded only as a judgment from Jehovah on 
 the nation. In v.^ords which were constantly read in the synagogues, they 
 sighed to hear that " The wrath of Jehovah was so kindled against His 
 people because they were defiled with their own v/orks, that He abhori-ed 
 His inheritance, and had given it into the hand of the heathen, and let 
 them that hated them rule over Israel." The very land seemed under a 
 curse. It appeared as if the dew of blessing no longer fell ; as if the fruits 
 had lost their fragrance and taste, and the fields refused their harvest. 
 The practical Eoman could not understand such an idealistic race ; with 
 him law was no less supreme that it was with the Jew, but his law was 
 that of the empire ; with the Jews that of an unseen God ; his had for its 
 aim external order and material civilisation, that of the Jew ignored 
 material progress, and was at war with the first conditions of joolitical 
 submission. Like the Jew, the Eoman started from the idea of duty, but 
 it was the duty owed to the state : the Jew repudiated any earthly 
 authority, and ovv^ed allegiance only to a theocracy. The Eoman cared 
 only for the present life ; to the Jew the present was indifferent. The one 
 worshipped the Yisible, the other the Unseen. To the Jew, the Eoman 
 was unclean and accursed ; to the Eoman the Jew was ridiculous for his 
 religion, and hateful for his pride. Each despised the other. Pompey 
 had begun by treating their inost sacred prejudices with contempt, and his 
 successors follov,^ed in his steps. The murderer of their royal house, and 
 the friend of the hated Samaritans, was made king in Jerusalem, and at a 
 later day, Eoman procurators sucked the very marrow from the land, op- 
 pressed the people to the uttermost, and paid no regard to their tenderest 
 sensibilities. The government was as ruthless as that of England in India
 
 208 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 would be if it trampled under foot, in the pride of strength, every Hindoo 
 prejudice it found in its way. Eoman religion was faith in the magic of 
 the Koman name, and the irresistibleness of the Eoman arms ; a worship 
 only of brute force, hard, unfeeling, coarse : which could not understand 
 anything transcendental like the creed of the Jew, or the possibility of men 
 caring for an idea, far less of their dying for it. 
 
 It was no wonder that the Eabbis saw, in such a power, the fourth beast 
 of the Book of Daniel — " a beast diverse from all the others, exceeding 
 di^eadful, whose teeth were of iron and his nails of brass, which devoured, 
 brake in pieces, and stamped the remnant of God's people with its feet." 
 " Thou madest the world for our sakes," says one of the latest Jewish 
 seers, who himself had seen the miseries of these times ; " As for the other 
 people"— the Eomans and all mankind besides— "who also come from 
 Adam, Thou hast said they are nothing, but are like spittle, or the drop- 
 pings from a cask. And now, Lord, behold these heathen, who have 
 ever been counted as nothing, have begixn to be lords over us, and to de- 
 vour us. But we. Thy people, whom Thou hast called Thy first born. Thy 
 only begotten, and the object of Thy fervent love, are given into their 
 hands. If the world now be made for our sakes, why do wo not possess 
 our inheritance over the world ? How long shall this endure?" "Hear, 
 thou, I will talk with thee," He makes the Messiah say to the Eoman 
 Eagle, " Art thou not the last of the four beasts which I made to reign in 
 my world, who hast overcome all the beasts that were past, and hast power 
 over the world with great fearfulness, and much wicked oppression ? For 
 thou hast afflicted the meek, thou hast hurt the peaceable, thou hast loved 
 the Faithless and hated the Faithful, and destroyed the towns of those 
 who brought forth fruit, and the walls of those who did thee no harm. 
 Thy wrongful dealings have gone up to the Highest, and thy pride to the 
 Mighty one. Therefore, eagle, thou shalt perish with thy fearful wings, 
 thy baleful winglets, thy ferocious heads, thy tearing claws, and all thy 
 foul body ; that the earth may be refreshed, and be delivered from thy vio- 
 lence, and that she may hope in the justice and mercy of Him that made 
 her." 
 
 Such concentrated hatred and bitter contemptuous scorn from a people 
 so feeble and, to a Eoman, in many ways so ridiculous, was naturally met 
 by equal dislike, and if possible, greater contemj^t. The Jews of Eomc had 
 been originally, for the most part, slaves, and their numbers were in- 
 creased yearly by the sales of the slave market. But buyers had found 
 that Jew slaves vrere more trouble in a household, about their law, than 
 they were worth, and hence they were allowed to buy their own freedom 
 at a very low jorice. A vast number of Jewish freedmen had thus gra- 
 dually accumulated in Eome, to the horror of the Eomans at large, by 
 whom they were reckoned one of the greatest plagues of the city. The 
 Acts of the Apostles show how frequent must have been the tumults they 
 caused. Squalid, dirty, troublesome, repulsive, yet sneering at the gods 
 and temples of their masters, and constantly aggressive in the hope of 
 making proselytes, they were the special objects, by turns, of the ridicule, 
 loathing, and hatred of the haughty Eomans, and this hatred was in-
 
 EEFOEE THE DAWN. 209 
 
 tensified bj the favour their religion had found with some of the Eoman 
 wives and daughters. The officials who went from Rome to Judca to rule 
 the Hebrews, carried with them, already, a scorn and abhorrence for the 
 nation, which found its expression in a ready belief of reports so revolting 
 and incredible as that they worshipped the head of an ass, as a god, in 
 their Temple. What treatment they might expect from Eoman governors 
 is shadowed in many utterances of different classes. Speaking of the 
 Jews sent to the pestilent climate of Sardinia, to put down the robbers 
 there, Tacitus adds, "If they perished by the climate it was no loss." 
 Apollonius of Tj^ana is made^to[say to Vespasian, in Alexandria — " "\Ylien 
 one came from the scene of war and told of 30,000 Jews whom you had 
 killed in one battle, and of 60,000 in another, I took the speaker aside, and 
 asked him, ' What are you talking about ; have you nothing more worth 
 telling than that ? ' " Even the calm and lofty Marcus Aurclius, at a later 
 day, is ci edited with an expression of the common hatred of the Jews, 
 which, in its biting contempt, surpasses all others. " O Marcomanni ! O 
 Quadi ! Sarmatians ! " cried the Emperor, when he passed from Egypt 
 into Palestine, and found himself among the Jews, " I have found a people, 
 at last, who are lower than you ! " 
 
 The feelings of the Jews towards the Romans had originally been those 
 of admiration and respect, for their bravery and great deeds. Judas 
 Maccaba^us had sought their alliance, and, even so late as the reign of 
 John Hyrcanus, the nation retained kindly feelings towards them. It was 
 the fault of Pompey that so great and sudden a revulsion took place. The 
 treachery by which he got possession of the country and the capital ; the 
 insolent contempt with which he defiled the Holy of Holies, and the vanity 
 which led him to carry off the royal family, who had put themselves con- 
 fidingly under his protection, to grace his triumph, filled the race with an 
 abiding hatred of the very name of Rome. A writer of the times has left 
 us the impressions made by such acts : — " My ear heard the sound of war, 
 the clang of the trumpet which called to murder and ruin ! The noise of 
 a great army, as of a mighty rushing wind, like a great pillar of fire, roll- 
 ing hitherward over the plains ! Jehovah brings up hither a mighty 
 wai'rior from the ends of the earth. He has determined war against 
 Jerusalem and against His land ! The princes of the land went out to him 
 with joj^ and said, 'Thou art welcome, come in peace.' They have made 
 smooth the rough ways before the march of the stranger ; they opened the 
 gates of Jerusalem. They crowned the walls with garlands. He entered, 
 as a father enters the house of his sons in peace. He walked abroad in 
 perfect security. Then he took possession of the towers and the walls of 
 Jerusalem, for God had led hiin in safety, through her folly. He dcstroj-ed 
 her princes, and every one wise in counsel, and poured out the blood of 
 Jerusalem like unclean water. He led her sons and daughters into 
 captivity. The strange people have gone up to the altar, and, in their 
 pride, have not taken off their shoes in the holy places." 
 
 "In his haughty pride," cries the singer in his second psalm, which 
 throws light on the corruption of Israel in the half-century before Christ, 
 and on Jewish thought at large, " the sinner has broken down the strong 
 
 r
 
 210 TUB LIFE OE CHEIST. 
 
 Avails with tlie ram, and thou liast not liinclerecl. Ilcatlicu aliens have 
 gone up into Tliy holy place ; tliey have walked up and dorm in it, with 
 their shoes, in contempt. Because the sons of Jerusalem have defiled the 
 holy things of the Lord, and have profaned the gifts consecrated to God, 
 by their transgressions of the Law. For this, He has said, ' Cast forth 
 these things from me, I have no pleasure in them.' The beauty of holiness 
 have they made vile ; it has been profaned before God for ever ! 
 
 " Your sons and your daughters are sold into woeful slavery ; they are 
 branded, as slaves, on their necks, in the sight of the heathen. For your 
 sins hath He done this ! Therefore gave He them up into the hands of 
 those that were stronger than they, for He turned away His face from 
 pitying them, — youth, and old man, and child together, because they all 
 sinned, in not hearing His voice. The heavens scowled on them, and. the 
 earth loathed them, for no man on it had done as they. 
 
 " God has made the sons of Jerusalem a derision. Every one gave him- 
 self up to the sin of Sodom. They flaunted their wickedness before the 
 sun. They committed their evil deeds before it. They made a show of 
 their guilt. Even the daughters of Jerusalem are profane, according to 
 Thy judgment, for they have defiled themselves shamelessly vfith the 
 heathen. For all these things my heart mourns. 
 
 " I will justify Thee, God, in uprightness of heart, for in Thy judg- 
 ments, O God, is seen Thy righteousness. For Thou givest to the wicked, 
 according to their works, according to the great evil of their doings. 
 Thou hast revealed their sins, that Thy judgment may be seen. Thou 
 blottest out their memory from the earth. The Lord is a righteous judge, 
 and regardeth no man's countenance. He has dragged down her beauty 
 from the throne of glory. For Jerusalem has been put to shame by the 
 heathen, when they trampled it under foot. Put on sackcloth for robes of 
 beauty, a wreath of twisted rushes instead of a crown. God has taken 
 away her mitre of glory, which He put on her brow. Her pride is cast 
 down in dishonour on the earth. 
 
 " And I looked, and prayed before the face of the Lord, and said. Let it 
 suffice Thee, Lord, that Thou hast made heavy Thy hand upon Jerusalem, 
 in the coming against her of the heathen. Because they have treated her 
 with scorn, and have not spared in their wrath and fury, and they will not 
 bring this to an end, unless Thou, O Lord, reprovest them in Thy wrath. 
 For they have not done it in zeal for Thee, but from the wish of their 
 heart, to pour out their rage against us like furies. Delay not, God, to 
 smite them on the head, that the haughtiness of the dragon may sink down 
 in dishonour. 
 
 " I had waited but a little till God showed me his haughty pride brought 
 low, on the shores of Egypt, and his body set at nought by the least, alike 
 on land and sea, — rotting upon the waves in pitiful contempt, and having 
 no one to bury it. Because he had set God at nought and dishonoured 
 Him. He forgot that he was only a man : he did not think of what might 
 be to come. He said, ' I shall be lord [of sea and land,' and he did not 
 remember that God is great and resistless in His great might. He is 
 King of Heaven, and the judge of kings and rulers, exalting His servant,
 
 BEFORE THE DAWN. 211 
 
 and stilliug the proud iu eternal dishonour and ruin becaiTse they have not 
 ackuowlcdp-ed Him." 
 
 Herod's flattery of Rome, and his treachery to what the patriots thought 
 the national cause, only intensified the bitterness of such recollections. 
 
 Amidst all the troubles of the nation, ho-wever, their hopes were still 
 kept alive by a belief which, like much else among the Jews, is unique in 
 history. Their sacred books had from the earliest days predicted the 
 appearance of a great deliverer, who should " redeem Israel out of all his 
 troubles." " All the prophets," says the Talmud, " prophesied only of the 
 days of the Messiah." In later days this hope was intensified by a new 
 development of the national literature. In the second century before 
 Christ, the Book of Daniel had created a profound sensation by its pre- 
 dictions, universally current, of the destruction of the heathen, and the 
 elevation of the chosen people to supreme glory, under the Messiah. These 
 were, at that time, interpreted as applying to the disastrous period of 
 religious persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes, which provoked the 
 Maccaba^an revolt, and ultimately led to the tejnporary independence of 
 the nation, with its short, bright glimpse of prosperity, as if heralding the 
 Messianic reign. The heathen were to "devour the whole earth for a 
 time, and tread it down and break it iu pieces." But " the kingdom and 
 dominion, and the greatness of the rule under the whole heaven, shall be 
 given to the people of the saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an 
 everlasting kingdom, and all dominioiis shall serve and obey Him." In 
 such words, Israel read its future political glory, as the seat of a universal 
 theocracy, which was to replace the kings of the heathen, and flourish iu 
 perpetual supremacy over all mankind. The head of this world-wide 
 empire they saw in "the Son c^ Man," who was to "come in the clouds of 
 heaven ; " dominion and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, 
 and languages should serve Him for ever, being given Him by the Ancient 
 of Days. 
 
 With the paling of the Maccabasan glory, after its short brightness, and 
 the decay of religious enthusiasm, under the corrupting influence of its 
 later kings, — a reaction not unlike the license of the Restoration as con- 
 trasted with the severe Puritanism of- the CommouAvealth, — a copious 
 literature sprang up, based on the model, which, in the Book of Daniel, 
 had so profoundly affected the spirit of the age. * With the independence 
 of the nation, prophecy had, long ago, gradually ceased, for the sphere o£ 
 the prophet was incompatible with the rule of the enemies of his race. 
 Zechariah and Malachi had appeared after the return from exile, but, with 
 the latter, it was universally acknowledged, the grand roll of ]:)rophets had 
 ended. The last of the order had, indeed, himself, virtually announced its 
 suspension, in pointing to the coming of Elijah, before the great and dreadful 
 day of Jehovah, as its next appearance. From that time, it became fixed 
 in the popular mind that Elijah, and perhaps, also, a "prophet like unto 
 Moses," would herald the Messiah and his kingdom. The peculiar consti- 
 tution of the State inevitably gave this glorious future a political, rather 
 than a spiritual character, for their conception of the kingdom of God was 
 that of a theocracy, such as God Himself had founded amongst them,
 
 212 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 under Moses — an earthly state, witli God as king, and His "anointed " aa 
 vicegerent, to carry out His written law. Tlieir only idea of an " anointed 
 one," that is, a Messiah, must have been derived from the illustrations 
 offered by the earlier history of the nation. They knew of Moses, Joshua, 
 the judges, and the kings. The patriarchs were spoken of in the Scrip- 
 tures as tlie anointed of Jehovah, or His Messiahs, and so, also, were high 
 priests and prophets, and their kings, and even the Persian monarch, 
 Cyrus. Among the later Jews, of the ages immediately before Christ, 
 " The Messiah" had become the usual name of the Deliverer predicted by 
 the prophets, and was almost exclusively restricted to Him. But at no 
 time had the spiritual been separated from the political, in its use. Indeed, 
 the whole theory of their national government inevitably joined the secular 
 and the religious. The State and the Church were, with it, identical, the 
 former being but the outward embodiment of the latter. Jewish politics 
 were only Jewish religion in its public relations, for God was the political 
 as well as religious Head of the nation. It was, hence, all but impossible 
 for a Jew to conceive of the Messiah, except as the divinely commissioned 
 vicegerent of God, in his double sphere of earthly and heavenly kingship 
 in Israel. 
 
 The long silence of prophets, and the keen politico-religious enthusiasm 
 with which the advent of a Messiah was expected — an enthusiasm resting 
 on ScrijDture throughout, but re-kindled to a passionate and abiding 
 fervour by the Book of Daniel — incited some nobler spirits to seize the 
 pen, and keep alive the national faith and hope, by compositions conceived 
 in the same spirit. To give these greater weight, they were ascribed to 
 the most famous men of past ages, and sent abroad in their names. A 
 Eevelation of the future glory of Israel appeared in the name of the ante- 
 diluvian Enoch, as one, of all men, worthy to have been favoured with 
 Divine communications. Another consisted of j^salms assigned to Solomon, 
 and a third was said to have been written by the great Scribe, the second 
 Moses — Ezra. Othei's are still preserved in the collection of " Apocrypha" 
 till recently bound up with our English Bibles. Of the whole, the first 
 Book of the Maccabees illustrates the fervent patriotism and stern puritan- 
 ism of the war of liberty. The Wisdom of the Son of Sirach sets in a 
 striking light the saying of Esdi\as, that, even in these dark days, though 
 many " walked feignedly before God, others feared His name according to 
 His will, and taught His law nobly." No better key to the religious spirit 
 of an age can be had than its religious literature. That of Israel, as the 
 age of Christ drew near, was more and more concentrated on the expected 
 Messiah, and the preparation needed for his coming. The Book of Enoch, 
 the Psalms of Solomon, and the Fourth Book of Esdras, successively 
 reveal the white heat of the national hopes of which they were the 
 expression. 
 
 Nothing could be more fitted to influence the excitable imagination of au 
 Oriental peoiole, accustomed to such a style in their sacred writings — 
 nothing more fitted to intensify a fanatical spiritual pride in themselves as 
 the favourites of heaven, or to deepen their hatred of all other nations — 
 than the mystic chapters of the Book or Enoch, of which the earlier date
 
 BEFORE THE DAWN. 213 
 
 perhaps fortyj^ears before tlic entrance of tlie Romans into Palestino, 
 while the whole are as old as tlic reign of Herod. In one, Israel is painted 
 under the figure of a flock of white sheep, while the nations round are the 
 Egyptian wolf, the Phenician dog, the black wild boar Edom, the Arabian 
 vulture, the Sj'rian raven, and the Grecian eagle; or are branded as 
 jackals, kites, foxes, and swine. Hyrcanus, the sheep with the great horn, 
 drives away the Grecian eagles, the Sja-ian ravens, the Egyptian kites, the 
 Arabian vulture, and the Philistine dogs, who were tearing the flesli of the 
 sheep of the House of Israel. The Lord of the slieej) comes to His flock, 
 the rod of His wrath is in His hand, and strikes the earth till it quakes, 
 and all the beasts and birds flee from the sheep, and sink in the earth, which 
 closes over them. A great throne is then set up in the beloved land, and 
 the Lord of the sheep sits on it, and opens the sealed books. He will now 
 drive the kings from their thrones and kingdoms, and will break the teetb 
 of sinners, and, finally, chase out the heathen from the congregation of 
 His people, and cast down the oppressors of Israel into a deep place, " full 
 of fire, flaming, and full of pillars of fire." A " great everlasting heaven" 
 will spring forth from the midst of the angels, and the day of judgment 
 will begin, " when the blood of the sinners will be as high as a horse's 
 breast, and as a chariot axle," and when legions of angels shall appear in 
 the skies, and the righteous be raised from the grave. The days of the 
 Messiah—" the Elect," " the Anointed One," " the Son of Man," who is 
 also " Son of God" — will then begin. 
 
 "The plants of righteousness" (the Jewish nation) will flourish for ever 
 and ever under His reign, for He is to come forth from the " throne of 
 the majesty of God," and rule over all, as the object of universal 
 adoration. 
 
 The pictures given of the blessedness of Israel in its world-wide empire, 
 throw light on the nobler side of the Jewish nature, for we may seek in 
 vain for anything so pure and lofty in the concejotions of any other people. 
 "Blessed be ye, O ye righteous and elect ones, for glorious will be your 
 lot ! The righteous shall dwell in the liglit of the Sun, and the elect in 
 the light of the Life Eternal ; the days of their life shall have no end, and 
 the days of the holy ones shall be countless. And they shall seek the 
 light, and find righteousness beside the Lord of Spirits. The righteous 
 shall have peace with the Lord of the World. They will dwell beside the 
 Water of Life, in the gardens of righteousness, and shine like the light for 
 ever and ever. Their hearts will rejoice, because the number of the 
 righteous is fulfilled, and the blood of the righteous avenged." 
 
 The Psalms of Solomon, writtenjit the time of Pompey's invasion, look 
 forward confidently to the coming of the Messiah, and the setting up of 
 the everlasting kingdom of God, when the sons and daughters of Jerusalem 
 will be brought back again from the east and the west, because Jehovah 
 has had compassion on her affliction. The 17th and 18th Psalms, especially, 
 bring before us, with equal vividness and beauty, the hopes that glowed 
 in the national breast in the days of Christ, and broke out into wild 
 violence in the religious revolt of Judas the Galilasan. Joseph, in his 
 cottage at ISTazareth, may often have listened to them, or read them, for
 
 214 THE LIFE OF CUEIST. 
 
 tlioy were familiar to every Jev^, and many a group of Galiltcaii 
 villagers gathered, from time to time, to licar tliem repeated, in Eastern 
 fashion, by some reader or reciter. They ran thus : — ■ 
 
 " Lord, Thou alone art our King for ever and ever, and in Thee shall our 
 souls make tlieir boast. What is the span of man's life upon earth ? 
 Acco]-ding to the time fixed by the Lord, and man's hope upon Him ! But 
 we hope in God our Saviour, because the power of our God is Vidth mercy, 
 for ever, and the kingdom of our God is over the heathen, for judgment, 
 for evei". 
 
 " Thou, Lord, didst choose for Thyself David, to be king over Israel, 
 and didst sv.^ear to him, respecting his seed for ever, that tliere wouhl 
 never fail a prince of his house before Thee, for ever. But for our sins, 
 the wicked have risen up against us ; they (the Asmoucan party), whom 
 Thou hast not sent forth, have done violence against us, and have gotten 
 the power over us. They have put av/ay Thy name Vvfith violence, aiid 
 have not glorified it, though it be above all in majesty ; they have set up a 
 king over them. They have laid waste the throne of David, with a haughty 
 shout of triumph. But Thou, Lord, wilt cast them down, Thou wilt 
 take av/ay their seed from the earth, raising up against them an alien, who 
 is not of our race. After their sins shalt Thou recompense them, God ; 
 they will receive according to their works. According to their works will 
 God show pity on them ! He will hunt out their seed, and will not let 
 them go. Faithful is the Lord, in all His judgments which He performs 
 in the earth, 
 
 " He who has not the Law has desolated our land of its inhabitants. He 
 has made the youth, and the old man, and the child disappear together. 
 In his fury he has sent away our sons to the west ; and our ]:)rince3 he has 
 made an open show, and has not spared. Our enemy has done hauglitily 
 in his alien pride, and his heart is a stranger to our God. And he did all 
 things, in Jerusalem, as the heathen do with their idols, in their cities. 
 And the sons of the covenant have been made to serve them, and have been 
 mingled among heathen nations. There was not one among them who 
 showed pity or truth in Jerusalem. Those who loved the synagogues of the 
 saints fled from them ; they were driven away as sparrows from their nest. 
 They wandered in deserts, that their souls might be saved from defilement, 
 and the wilderness was lovely in their sight, in saving their souls. They 
 wore scattered over the whole earth, by those who have not the Law. 
 
 " Behold, Lord, and raise up to Israel, their king, the Son of David, at 
 the time Thou, God, knowcst, to rule Israel, Thy child. And gird him, 
 O Lord, with strength, that he may break in pieces the unjust rulers. 
 Cleanse Jerusalem, in wisdom and righteousness, from the heathen who 
 tread it under foot. Thrust out the sinners from Thine inheritance; 
 grind to dust the haughtiness of the trangressors ; shatter in pieces all 
 their strength, as a potter's vessel is shattered by a rod of iron. Destroy 
 utterly, with the word of Thy mouth, the heathen that have broken Thy 
 Law ; at Ilis coming let the heathen flee before His face, and confound 
 Thou the sinners in the thoughts of their hearts. And He shall bring 
 together the holy race, and shall lead them in righteousness, and He shall
 
 BEFORE THE DAWN. 215 
 
 judge the tribes of the holy people, for the Lord, His God. And He -will 
 not suffer unrighteousness to dwell in the midst of them, nor will any 
 wicked man be let dwell among them. For He will take knowledge 
 that they are all sons of God, and He will portion them out in their tribes, 
 over the land. And the stranger and the foreigner will dwell among 
 them no more. He will judge the people and the heathen, in the wisdom 
 of His righteousness. 
 
 " And He will bring the peoples of the heathen under His yoke to serve 
 Him, and He will exalt the Lord exceedingly, in all the earth. And He 
 will cleanse Jerusalem in righteousness, so that, as_it was in the beginning, 
 the heathen shall come from the uttermost parts of the earth, to see His 
 glory, and her weary, wasted sons shall return, bearing gifts, to see the 
 glory of the Lord, with which God has glorified her. And He shall be a 
 righteous king over them, taught of God. And there shall bo no unright- 
 eousness in their midst in His days, because they are all holy, and their 
 king is the Christ, the Lord. For He shall not trust in the horse, or the 
 chariot, or in the bow ; neither shall He gather to Himself silver and gold 
 for war, and He shall not trust in numbers, in the day of battle. The 
 Lord, Himself, is His king, and His trust in the Mighty God, and HE shall 
 set all the heathen in terror before Him. For He shall rule all the earth, 
 by the word of His mouth, for ever. He shall make the people of the 
 Lord blessed, in wisdom and in joy. And He, being pure from sin, for 
 the ruling of a great people, will rebuke kings, and will cut off trans- 
 gressors by the might of His "word. And He shall not want help from 
 God, in His days. For the Lord shall make Him mighty in the Holy 
 Spirit, and Vr^ise in counsel, and strong, and righteous. And the favour of 
 the Lord shall be His strength, and He shall not be weak. His hope is in 
 the Lord, and who can do anything against Him ? Mighty in His doings, 
 and strong in the fear of God ; feeding, as a shepherd, the flock of the 
 Lord, in faith and righteousness. He will let no one among them fail in the 
 Law, He will lead them all in holiness, and there will be no haughty 
 oppressing of them in His rule. 
 
 " This is the glorious excellence of the King of Israel, which is kuowTi 
 to God. He shall raise Him over the House of Israel, to instruct it. His 
 words are pui'er than the most pure gold. He will judge the people in 
 the synagogues— the tribes of the saints. His words will be like words 
 of the holy ones, in the midst of the holy multitudes. Blessed are those 
 who shall live in those days, to see the good things which God shall do for 
 Israel, in the gathering together of her tribes. God shall hasten His 
 mercy towards Israel. He shall purge ns from the defilement of the 
 presence of our enemies, the profane. The Lord, He is King, for ever 
 and ever ! 
 
 " Lord, Thy mercy is on the works of Thy hands for ever and ever ! 
 Thy goodness to Israel is a gift beyond price. Thine eyes look on, and 
 nothing will fail of Thy promises. Thine ears will attend to the supplica- 
 tion of the needy who trusts in Thee, Thy judgments arc in all the earth, 
 in mercy, and Thy love is towards the seed of Abraham, the sons of Israel 
 Thou hast Thyself taught us, as Tln^ son, Thine only begotten, Thy first
 
 216 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 born, so that we may turn an obedient heart away from ignorance and sin. 
 
 " God shall purify Israel, against the day of mercy and blessing, against 
 the day of the calling forth of His Christ (Anointed) to rule. Blessed are 
 those who shall live in those days ! " 
 
 In the Fourth Book of Esdkas, which was circulating among the people 
 at the birth of Christ, the nation found its strength and weakness, alike, 
 reflected, and all its religious hopes flattered to the utmost. " If the world 
 be made for our sakcs, why do we not possess our inheritance over it ? " 
 asks the supposed Ezra. In the fifth of a series of " Visions of the Night," 
 for which he had prepared by long fasting, he sees an angel rise from the 
 sea, with twelve wings and three heads, the mystic symbol of the triumph- 
 ant heathen power of the Syro- and Egypto-Macedonian kings, and of that 
 of Eome, imder Cassar, Antony, and then Octavian, who won the final 
 victory, and universal monarchy. After a time, he, Octavian (Augustus) 
 alone, as the one-headed eagle, remains. But now appears a mighty Lion 
 — the Messiah — who calls with a human voice to the eagle, " Art thou not 
 he who remainest of the four beasts " (the four heathen world-empires of 
 Daniel), " which I created that they might rule in my world, that the end 
 of times might come through them ? Thou hast judged the earth, but not 
 in truth, for thou liast troubled the peaceful, and Avronged the unoffending; 
 thou hast loved liars, and hast overthrown the cities of the industrious, 
 and hast razed their walls, though they did thee no harm. Thy wrongful 
 dealing has risen to the Highest, and thy pride to the Mighty One. The 
 Most High, also, has remembered His times, and behold, they are closed, 
 and the ages are ended. Therefore, begone, thou eagle,, and be seen no 
 more — with thy fearful wings, thy baleful winglets, thy ferocious heads, 
 thy tearing claws, and all thy foul body, that the earth may be refreshed, 
 and may recover itself, when freed from thy violence, and that she may 
 hope in the justice and pity of Him v/ho made her ! " "And I looked, and, 
 behold, the eagle was no more seen, and all its body was burned up, and 
 the earth grew pale with fear." Rome, then just entering on its long 
 imperial history, and in the height of its greatness, was to be blotted out 
 from the earth by the Messiah. Past generations had thouglit the Syrian 
 persecutions must be the tribulation which was to herald the coming of 
 the Messiah, and to end heathen domination on the earth ; then the perse- 
 cutions and wars of the later Maccabees ; then the huge world-turmoil of 
 the Eoman civil wars, in succession, seemed to proclaim His approach. 
 But, now, the supposed Ezra looked for it in the reign of Augustus, as 
 men, a little later, expected it on the death of Herod. The Lion, rising 
 from the forest, would rebuke the haughty Roman eagle, and would sit in 
 judgment on the heathen, free His holy people, and bless them till the 
 cominij; of the end. 
 
 Nor was this the only vision of the Messiah, presented by the supposed 
 Ezra. " Behold," says he, "a wind rose from the heart of the sea, and in 
 it the form of a Man " (the Son of God), " and all its waves were troubled. 
 And I saw, and behold the Man came on the clouds of heaven, and where- 
 soever He turned His face and looked, all tilings trembled before Him, and 
 all that heard His voice melted like wax in the flame. But a countless
 
 BEFORE THE DAWN. 217 
 
 host from all parts of the earth came up to make war against Him. Anil 
 He cut out for Himself, by His word, a great mountain— which is IMouut 
 7Aon—nnd stood on the top of it, and when the multitude pressed with 
 trembling against Him, He lifted against them neither hand nor weapon, 
 Init consumed them utterly with a flood of fire from His mouth, and the 
 lightning flashes of the storm from His lips, and nothing remained of them 
 but smoke and ashes. Then He rose and came down from the mountain, 
 and called to Him a peaceful multitude, some glad and some sorry, some 
 bound as captives, some bearing gifts, and these were the ten tribes, whom 
 He had brought from their hiding-place in a land beyond Assyria, where 
 never man else dwelt, cleaving the Euphrates to let them pass over, and 
 gathering them to their own land again, that their brethren there, and 
 they from afar, might rejoice evermore together." 
 
 To Esdras, the reign of the Idumean Herod over the Jewish people 
 seems a second note of the culmination of heathen rule and its speedy 
 overthrow. " The end of this age," says he, " is Esau, and Jacob is the 
 beeiinninGc of that which is to come ; " the death of the Edomite was to 
 maik the opening of the reign of the sons of Jacob. " During his life, or 
 at his death," says another vision, " the Messias (or Son of God) will 
 descend from heaven with those men vrho have not tasted of death, and 
 the books will be opened before the face of the sky, and all shall see them, 
 and the trumpet shall sound, and ever}^ cheek will grow pale at the hear- 
 ing it. And friends will fight at that time against friends, and the earth 
 shall tremble and all who dwell on it, and the springs and fountains shall 
 cease running for three hours. And the hearts of the people shall be 
 changed, and they will be turned into other men. For all sin and wicked- 
 ness will be destroyed, and faith will flourish, and corruption shall be 
 rooted out, and truth, which had been lost for a long time, will reign." 
 Kegions hitherto unknown and barren will be planted, to shame the 
 heathen, by showing the greater glory of the kingdom of the Messiah than 
 of theirs. Yet, this golden age is to last only 400 years, at the end of 
 which the Messiah will die. The earth will then pass away. The dead 
 will.be raised, and the^ great judgment held, after which "the righteous 
 shall go into the presence of God, and shine like the sun, and dwell in the 
 midst of His everlasting light, and die no more, and a single day shall be 
 as seventy years. And they shall live for ever and ever. But the wicked 
 shall go to everlasting fire." 
 
 Such a literature, widely diffused, penetrated the nation with its spirit, 
 and coloured its destiny. ISTor were the books quoted the only writings of 
 a similar tone that everywhere formed the study, and fired the soul of the 
 contemporaries of Jesus. A succession of these heralds of the Messiah 
 perpetuated the theme. After the Psalms of Solomon and the Book of 
 Esdras, we have the anticipations of the Targums, and of Pliilo, and the 
 pictures of the Book of Jubilees. In the Messiah's time, we read in the 
 latter, "the days will begin to lengthen, and the children of men will live 
 longer, from generation to generation, and from day to day, till their lives 
 come nigh to a thousand years. And there will be no more any old, or 
 any weary of life, but they will all be like children and boys, and will fulfil
 
 213 THE LIFE OF GHEIST. 
 
 all tlieiv days in peace and joy, and there will be no accuser amongst them, 
 or any corrupter. For all their days will be days of blessing." 
 
 The result of influences so unique, is almost beyond imagination, to an 
 age so cold and practical as our own. A parallel may, perhaps, be found 
 in the universal excitement which pervaded Christendom at the end of 
 the tenth ccntuiy, when the 1,000 years of the Book of Eevelation were 
 thought to be closing, and the end of the world was believed at hand. The 
 consternation that then seized all, alike, made men give up everything, to 
 be ready for the descent of the Judge. It was the one thought. Count- 
 less pilgrims sold all, and set off to the Holy Land to await the expected 
 Saviour. Not less deep or universal was the expectation of the Messiah 
 in the days of Chi'ist, rousmg men, even against hope, once and again, in 
 the literal use of the words of the Maccabasan psalm — " to take a two- 
 edged sword in their hand, to execute vengeance on the heathen, and 
 punishments on the nations ; to bind their kings Avith chains, and their 
 nobles with links of iron : to execute upon them the judgments written. 
 This was an honour granted to all the Saints." 
 
 The effect of the long reign of Herod on Jewish parties was immense. 
 Sprung from a race which the Jews detested, and the son of a hated father, 
 he had owed it to the Roman Senate that heAvas able to crush the national 
 liberties imder foot, and usurp the title of King of Judea, which no stranger 
 before him had borne. His instincts were cruel and harsh ; his life and 
 tastes, pagan and sensual ; his whole nature opposed to everything Jewish. 
 He had murdered member after member of his family, and among others 
 the last of the native royal race, which the people venerated : he had put 
 to death most of the leading Eabbis ; he had filled the land with heathen 
 architecture ; he had defiled Jerusalem by a circus and theatre ; he had 
 degraded the pontificate by putting two high priests to death, after depos- 
 ing them ; he had violated the tomb of David, in search of treasure ; he 
 had burned the national registers, so essential to a people among whom so 
 much, in their priesthood and common life, turned on their descent ; in 
 his old age, he had burned alive two famous Rabbis, and slain many of the 
 youth of Jerusalem, for their zeal for the Law ; and, when dying, he had 
 left a command, to murder, in cold blood, the collected elders of the 
 nation, to fill the land with sorrow for itself, if not for him, when he was 
 gone. 
 
 Against such a master the two great parties, Pharisees and Sadducees, — 
 notwithstanding their differences, above all things Jews, — felt for the time 
 drawn closer together. Except the high priests, who were Herod's 
 creatures, the courtiers who worshipped the power of the day, and the 
 soldiers loyal to a warlike king, few Avere for Herod. The Sadducees for- 
 sook the court ; the high priesthood was for the time taken from their 
 party. An Alexandrian family into which Herod had married, received 
 it to ennoble them,— men suspected of foreign vicAvs, royalists by alliance, 
 and opposed to the people by their origin. Tor the first time we hear of 
 preachers. The last martyrs under Herod — Jr.das, son of Saripheus, and 
 Mattathias, son of Margalouth— were in reality tribunes of the people, to 
 whoso stirring addresses, the great riot in which the golden eagle in the
 
 BEFORE THE DAWN. 919 
 
 temple was thrown dov/ii, was due. Tliey were burned alive, but men of 
 the same mould took their place, allies and friends of the multitudes who 
 flod to tl'.e hills, to emerge from time to time from their hiding places, to 
 harass the troops of Herod. Eevolutionary times always produce such 
 men, whom timeservers of their day have been wont to denounce as 
 brigands or robbers. They were, however, in reality the Maccabees of 
 their age. " The followers of Judas the Galilajan," sa.ys Josephus, " in all 
 their opinions are at one with the Pharisees —that is, with the nation^ — 
 but they have an inextinguishable passion for liberty, and will own none 
 but God as Master ; they count any tortures that they may endure, how- 
 ever dreadful, as nothing, nor do they heed the sufferings their parents or 
 friends may bear for their sakcs," — for these were punished if the offenders 
 themselves were not caught, — " but nothing will make them call any man 
 Master." It was for putting Hczekiah, the father of Judas, to death, in 
 the beginning of his reign, that the Sanhedrim, then still vigorous, tried 
 to bring Herod to trial, which they never would have done on behalf of a 
 mere " robber." What the nation thought of his son Judas is shown in 
 the words of a Rabbi, " In the world to come, God will gather round Judas 
 a multitude like him, and Avill set them before His face." Men of the same 
 type had appeared before Pompeyat Damascus, pleading the cause neither 
 of Hyrcanus nor Aristobulus, Imt of the people of God, whose institutions 
 had never favoured royalty. But it was under Herod, and immediately 
 after his death, that these ideas first became the cry of any organized party. 
 The people had tii-ed of the dry and lifeless discussions of the Rabbis. 
 Their subtleties and legal distinctions left their hearts untouched. But 
 men had risen like Hezekiah, Judas of Galilee, Mattathias, and Judas, son 
 of Saripheus, whose harangues set their souls on fire. These earnest 
 spirits did not trouble with barren decisions ; they preached and roused. 
 They did not dispute about some obscure chapter of Exodus or Leviticus ; 
 their texts were the inspired words of the prophets, the burning and 
 eloquent exhortations of Isaiah and Jeremiah. These they recited, com- 
 mented on, and enlarged, before multitudes eager to hear them. The 
 voice of the ancient Oracles had retained all its freshness, and suited the 
 passing times as if written respecting them. For Jehoiakim men read 
 Herod ; Rome took the place of Babylon ; and the gloomy prophecies of 
 Jeremiah seemed about to be fulfilled anew on the second Temple. For 
 the last time, the almost withered tree of Jewish nationality seemed to live 
 again. In the soil of the Word of God it grew green once more, and 
 pushed out some last branches, but all the prophets through whose 
 impulse it thus revived, paid for the dangerous glorj- by a violent death. 
 
 In the lifetime of Jesus, parties had thus become transformed. The 
 Boethusians, or Alexandrians, raised to the pontificate by Herod, became 
 the royalists. They hoped to be able, under him and the Romans, to 
 maintain ecclesiastical matters as they were, and keep hold of their 
 privileges. They were the high-priestly families whose harshness and 
 violence are handed down to us in the Talmud. " A curse on the family 
 of Boethos, a curse on their spears " — was the anathema muttered in the 
 streets of Jerusalem — " a curse on the family of Hannas ! a curse on
 
 220 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 their vipcr-likc hissings ! A curso on the family of Kanthcra ! a curse on 
 their fine feathers ! A curse on the family of Ismacl Ben Phabi ! a curse 
 on their fists ! They are high priests themselves, their sons keep the 
 money, their sons-in-law ai'c captains, and their servants smite the j)Cople 
 with their staves." " The a])proaches of the sanctuary," continues the 
 Talmud, "echo with four cries— 'Depart hence, ye sons of Eli, you pollute 
 the Temple of the Eternal:' 'Depart hence, Issachar Kcfr Barkai, who 
 think only of yourself, and profane the consecrated victims.' — for he wore 
 silken gloves to protect his hands in his ministrations. Then, in keen 
 irony, comes the cry — ' Open your gates, Temple, and let Ismacl Ben 
 Phabi, the disciple of Phinehas, enter, that he may perform the high- 
 priestly rites;' and, finally, a fourth voice— 'Open wide, ye gates! and 
 let Johauan, the son of Nebedia, the disciple of gluttons and gourniand.s, 
 enter, that he may gorge on the sacrifices ! ' " No wonder this last pupil 
 of his Eoman masters won such a name, if the Talmud may be believed in 
 its statement, that he had three hundred calves, aiid as many casks of 
 wine, and forty scabs of joigeons, set apart for his kitchen. 
 
 The luxury and audacity of some of the high priests were pushed so far, 
 that it is related of Tsmael Ben Phabi that his mother made a tunic for 
 him, that cost a hundred mina3 — about £330. The mother of Eliezer Ben 
 Ifai'som had a similar I'obe made for him, if we may credit it, at a cost of 
 20,000 minge— £66,000, but it was so fine that the other priests would not 
 let him wear it, because he seemed naked from its transparency. The ex- 
 aggeration is, doubtless, great, for the fortune of this pontifical millionaire 
 is a favourite theme of Eabbiuical fancy, but such exaggeration itself 
 springs only from truth, striking enough to arrest the imagination. The 
 high priesthood had, in fact, sunk to the extremest corruption. " To what 
 time," asks Rabbi Jochanan, "do the words refer — 'The fear of the Lord 
 prolongeth life ' ? To that of the first Temple, which stood about four 
 hundred and ten years, and had only eighteen high priests from first to 
 last. And to what time do the other words refer — ' And the years of the 
 wicked shall be shortened ' ? To that of the second Tcmj^le, which stood 
 four hundred and twenty years, and had more than three hundred high 
 priests : for, deducting eighty-five years for five exceptional reigns, less 
 than a single year is left for each of all the other high priests." 
 
 The Pharisees and Sadducees, in these dark years, had to withdraw 
 completely from political life, and seek consolation in the study of the 
 Law, and in attracting the people to the schools where they taught or dis- 
 cussed. The extreme party among the former— the Zealots, the Jacobins 
 of the age, or rather its Maccabees — were enthusiastically popular with 
 the youth of the nation. Stei'n puritans, who knew no compromise, they 
 dreamed of triumphing, in their weakness, over the armies of the mistress 
 of the world, by the help of God, for whom they believed they fought. 
 No danger appalled their magnificent devotion, no sacrifice daunted tlieir 
 heroism. They were the rising party, from the time of Herod's death. 
 
 Thus, from about the time of Christ's birth, religion became, once more, 
 the great factor of Jewish national life. The bloody king had died in the 
 midst of rumours of the close approach of the Messiah.
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND. 221 
 
 The visit of the Magi, almost immediately before, must have fanned the 
 popular excitement still more, nor would the massacre at Bethlehem be 
 without its influence on the public mind. The insurrection of Mattathias 
 and Judas, at the head of the youth of the city, another incident of these 
 eventful months, had only anticipated the theocratic movement, to be 
 made, as all hoped, with success, as soon as the tyrant was dead. The 
 wild outbreaks headed by Simon the slave of Herod, Judas the Galilcean, 
 and Athronges the Perean shepherd, were all, more or less, connected with 
 religion. The deputation of fifty Jews, sent to Eome to petition Augustus 
 to set aside the Herods, and permit the restoration of the old theocracy, 
 had aroused the Jewish population of Eome itself. The Rabbis martyred 
 for destroying the golden eagle, and Judas and his colleague Zadok the 
 Eabbi, had, moreover, by tlieir inspiring harangues and appeals to Scrip- 
 ture, as well as by their hei-oism and the lofty grandeur of their aims, 
 given such an impulse to religious enthusiasm, and created such an ideal 
 of patriotic devotion, that the youth, of the country, henceforth, pressed 
 ever more zealously in their steps. Even the old looked on them as the 
 glory of their age. Patriotism became more and more identified with 
 fiery zeal for the Law, and war with the heathen for its sake became the 
 religious creed of the multitude. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXTII. 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF UEAVEN IS AT HAND. 
 
 f I 1 rilETY years of the life of Christ had passed in the seclusion of 
 -*- ISTazareth. In early youth He had learned Joseph's trade, and had 
 spent the long years that had intervened, in the duties of His humble 
 calling, for humble it must have been in a mountain village, where there 
 could be no demand for the skill required in larger communities, in that 
 age of civic embellishment. It is well for mankind that He chose such a 
 lowly lot. He could sympathise more keenly with the humble poor, from 
 having Himself shared their burden, l^or could labour have been more 
 supremely honoured than by the Saviour giving Himself to life-long toil. 
 Work — the condition of health, the law of progress, the primal duty in 
 Eden, and the safeguard of every virtue in all ages, is touched with a 
 grand nobility by the spectacle of the Carpenter of Nazareth. Idleness, in 
 any rank, becomes doubly a vice from the remembrance of such a lesson. 
 
 How these thirty years of obscurity were passed is left untold, beyond 
 the incidental mention of the calling Jesus pursued. Joseph, according to 
 old tradition, died wh en Jesus was eighteen years old, and it seems 
 certain, from the fact that he is not mentioned in the Gospels during 
 Christ's public life, that he died at least before that began. From the 
 time of his death, it is said, doubtless correctly, Jesus supported His 
 mother by the work of His hands, at least, in common with the others of 
 the household. It is added that He had grown up with four brothers, 
 James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude, and at least two sisters, whose names
 
 222 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 arc said to have been Estlier and Tamar ; but Judo and Simon, and both 
 tlio sisters, we are told, married before Joseph's death, and settled in the 
 town of Nazareth. Some think that Salome, the mother of James and 
 John, and wife of Zebcdee, was Mary's elder sister ; others identify lier 
 with the Mary who married Clopas-Alphajus, of JTazareth, but he, like 
 Joseph, appears to have died before Jesus began His ministry. This 
 couple seem to have had two sons, James and Joses, but it is not related 
 whether they had any daughters. The two households formed the family 
 circle of which Jesus was the wondrous centre. Tradition fills up the out- 
 line of one or two of those thus honoured — notably of James, afterwards 
 the saintly head of the Church of Jerusalem— a Nazarite from his child- 
 hood, and a martyr in his old age. Christ's brothers, Simon and Jude, 
 are also mentioned incidentally ; the one as head of the Church of 
 Jerusalem after James's death ; the other as having left descendants who 
 were cited before ] Domitiau, as belonging to the kingly race of David. 
 " There were yet living of the family of our Lord," says Eusebius, from 
 Hegesippus, who wrote about the year 160, " the grandchildren of Judas, 
 called the Ijrothcr of our Lord, according to the flesh. These were re- 
 ported as being of the family of David, and were brought to Doraitian. 
 For the emperor was as much alarmed about the appearing of Christ as 
 Herod had been. He put the question, whether they were of David's race, 
 and they confessed that they were. Tie then asked them what property 
 they had, or how much money they owned. And both of them answered that 
 they had between them only nine thousand denarii (under three hundred 
 pounds), and this they had, not in silver, but in the value of a piece of 
 land, containing only thirty-nine acres, from which they raised their taxes, 
 and supported themselves by their own labour. They also began to show 
 their hands, how they were hard and rough with daily toil." Domitiau 
 then asked tliem some questions about Christ, and, after hearing their 
 answers, dismissed them in contemptuous silence, as simple fools whom it 
 was not worth while to trouble. The momentary glim.jises still left us of 
 the home circle of Nazareth thus show lis a group of brothers, partly 
 working a small farm, but all in humble life, and all, alike, marked by so 
 strict an observance of the Law, that, even in their old age, the Jews them- 
 selves, and the Jewish Christians, held them in honour on this account. 
 
 Communion with His own heart ; the quiet gathering in of all the 
 lessons of life and nature arouiid; deep study of the thoughts and hearts 
 of men ; a silent mastery of the religious ideas of the day, and a deep 
 knowledge of the religious parties of the people, were daily advancing 
 Avlth Jesus. But in His spiritual life, in these years, as to the end, solitai'y 
 prayer and long continued communion with God, where no eye saw and 
 no ear heard Him, were, doubtless, His constant characteristics. The 
 Scriptures heard in the synagogues, or studied in the household, were His 
 habitual delight, till His intellect and heart were so saturated with their 
 words and spirit, that He knew them better than the scribes and Phari- 
 sees, who claimed to make them the one subject of their thoughts. 
 
 He mast have been a mystery to His household. He had been so even 
 to His mother, from the time of the Temple visit, and He ixiust have be-
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND. 223 
 
 corae, more and more so as He went on His own way, joining no party, 
 silent, tliouglitfnl, self-contained, given to solitude, and with a strange 
 light in His eyes, which looked as if they saw into the very soul of those 
 on whom, they were turned. His brothers and sisters could not understand 
 Him, even after He had become a public teacher. Alone in that beautiful 
 world of Galilee, with its skies filled with light^ts green plains and 
 valleys, wooded hills, and shining sea; amidst a brave, bright, fiery, noble 
 people, and yet so difEerent from them — a faithful son, a patient worker at 
 His daily toil, a friend of children and of the poor and needy, gentle, lov- 
 ing, pure, and yet so wholly apart by His very perfection — we may almost 
 think He must have been avoided rather than sought. 
 
 Taught by Joseph and Mary, and in the synagogue school, Jesus had 
 learned the Hebrew — which had long ceased to be a spoken language — so 
 as both to read and write it. Syro-Chaldaic was the language of the 
 people, and thus His mother tongue ; but He must also have gained know- 
 ledge enough of Greek, from its being spoken by so many in the different 
 towns of the country, to converse with those who knew no other speech 
 used in Palestine — such as the centurion or Pilate, or the Greeks who 
 sought an interview with Him in the last week of His life. 
 
 Amidst the many homely engagements of such a sphere, year after year 
 passed quietly and obscurely away. Events around, and in Judea, were 
 not wanting to keep tongues busy in the market place or in the streets, 
 and thoughtful hearts grew daily more so, as to the issue of all that 
 reached them from the great world outside their hills. Meanwhile, the 
 house of Mary must have been the ideal of a happy home in its relations 
 with her mysterious Son. His childlike hmnility, sunny contentment, 
 stainless purity, watchful tenderness, and transparent simplicity of soul, 
 would find expression in an ever ready delight in pleasing, an infinite 
 patience, an attractive meekness, and a constant industry. The discipline 
 by which His human character was perfected was not confined to the 
 closing years of His life, when He came publicly before men, but began 
 with His childhood and lasted to the end. We grow firm and strong to 
 resist and to do ; we gain the mastery of ourselves which brings superi- 
 ority, by a patient use of the incidents of daily life. To rule one's own 
 spirit on the petty theatre of a private sphere, creates a power which goes 
 with us to wider fields of action. The principles and graces which stand 
 the storms of public life must have been trained in the school of our daily 
 world. Even to have to wait for thirty years before the day came to begin 
 His great work, was itself a discipline to a holy soul. How must He have 
 sighed over the evils of the times ; over the sufferings of His fellow-men ; 
 over the loss of apparent opportunities; over the long-permitted reign of 
 evil. Enthusiasm burns to go out on its mission, and frets at delay, 
 blaming itself if a moment appear to be lost. But Jesus learned at 
 ISTazareth to wait His Father's time. Till " His hour was come " He could 
 control His longings, and wait for the Divine sanction, in obscurity so 
 complete, that even IS'athanacl, at Cana, only a few miles off, never heard 
 of Him till His public ministry had begun, and His fellow-townsmen had 
 no suspici(m of His being more than Jesus, the carpenter.
 
 224 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Thus, although reth'ed, these j^ears were in no measure lost. The 
 Divine wisdom, which marks out the life of all mcu, must have especially 
 watched and planned that of the Pei-fcct One of Nazareth. These un- 
 known secluded years teach us that the noblest lives may yet be the most 
 obscure; that life, in the highest sense, is not mere action, but the calm 
 reign of love and duty, towards God and man, in our allotted sphere — 
 that the truest and holiest joy is not necessarily that of public activity, 
 far less that of excitement and noise, but, rather, where amidst the calm 
 surrounding God and heaven are mirrored in an untroubled spirit. Com- 
 pared with the last years of His life, with their agitation and ceaseless 
 labour, Jesus, doubtless, often looked back fondly on the quiet days of 
 JSTazarcth, where the skies, filled with cloudless light, or the silent splen- 
 dour of the stars, or the dream of loveliness in all nature, far and near, 
 were only emblems of the heaven of His own soul. 
 
 With the growth in years, His riper faculties would find a growing 
 delight in the highest knowledge. Even as a boy. He had shown a Divine 
 love of truth, and a supreme devotion to God, which found its natural joy 
 in " seeking and asking," wherever He could hope to learn, Avhether in the 
 school of the Rabbis, in the Temple, or from townsmen of Nazareth. He 
 had doubtless a premonition of His calling, which urged Him on. Each 
 day more lovable. He would each day become more thoughtful. He might 
 gather much from without, but His soul developed itself mainly from 
 within. 
 
 Meamvhile, the time was drawing near for His manifestation to Israel. 
 
 Political oppression, by a natural reaction, had roused the hopes of a 
 great national future, to an intensity unknown before, even in Israel. 
 But while, at other times, similar hopes had affected only the narrow 
 bounds of Judea, they now went beyond it, and agitated the whole world. 
 They fell in with the instinctive feeling, which in that age pei'vaded all 
 counti'ies, that the existing state of things could not continue. 
 
 The reign of evil throughout the world seemed to have reached its 
 height. In Rome, the infamous Sejanus, long the favourite of Tiberius, 
 had at last fallen, but not till his career had filled the world with horror. 
 The enforcement of obsolete usiiry laws had spread financial ruin over the 
 empire. Forced sales made property almost worthless. Bankruptcy 
 spread far and near. The courts were filled with men imploring a repeal 
 of the obnoxious laws, and, meanwhile, the capitalists kept back their 
 money. Business was paralyzed throughout the world. Many of the rich 
 were reduced to beggary, and the misery of the poor became more ijitense. 
 To add to the universal ruin, informers reigned supreme at Rome, and 
 even the forms of law were forgotten. Multitudes, both innocent and 
 guilty, perished in the Roman jails— men, women, and childi-en— their 
 bodies being throAvn into the Tiber. To add to all, the vices of Tiberius, 
 fraught with evil to the world, grew daily more monstrous. Old age and 
 debauchery had bent his body, and covered his face with ugly blotches, 
 but his ta:5te for obscene pleasures steadily increased, and, to indulge them, 
 he shut himself up in loathsome retirement. Virtue and life were alike 
 at his mercy : no one was safe from infamous delators. A reign of terror
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND. 225 
 
 prevailed. Legal mnvclers and remorseless confiscations were increasinsj ; 
 immorality and crime held high carnival. The most distant countries 
 trembled before Rome, but its rule may be judged by the guilt, cruelty, 
 and corruption at the centre. 
 
 The misgoverned East was deeply agitated by the uneasy presentiment 
 of an impending change. ISfot only Judea, but the neighbouring countries, 
 were full of restless expectation. 
 
 Thus, in jjerhaps the very year in which John the Baptist appeared, the 
 Egyptian priests announced that the bird known as the Phoenix had once 
 more been seen. Originally the mythological emblem of the sun, it had 
 gradually come to be regarded as a representative of the cycles of the 
 history of the world, appearing at regular intervals, to consume itself, and 
 rise anew from its ashes, in mystic indication of the end of one great 
 psriod and the opening of another. It had appeared under Sesostris, 
 under Amasis, and under Ptolemy, the third king of the Macedonian 
 dynasty. That it should appear now, seemed strange, as the intervals of 
 its return had hitherto been 1,461 and 500 years, but it was only 250 since 
 Ptolemy. Meanwhile, the sacred colleges of the capital confirmed what 
 was announced by the Egyptian priests. If the Egyptian consoled him- 
 self, amidst the oppressions of the evil days of Tiberius, by the fond belief 
 that the mysterious bird was about to bear away the expiring age, the 
 priestly college of Rome reckoned that the great world-year was about 
 to end, and the age of Saturn to return. According to the augurs, the 
 ninth world-month, and, with it, the reign of Diana, had closed with 
 Cajsar s death, and the last month, that of Apollo, had begun. As, more- 
 over, the secular months were of unequal length, it seemed as if the end 
 of all things were at hand. Yirgil, in the generation before Christ, had 
 already written his Fourth Eclogue, with its pictures of the coming golden 
 age, borrowed from Isaiah, through the medium of the Jewish Sibylline 
 poems, then widely circulated throughout the world. It seems a satire on 
 his visions of future happy years, that the child, of whom he wrote in such 
 lofty strains, not only failed to bring in a golden age, but died of hunger, 
 under Tiberius, in the very year, it would seem, in Avhich Jesus Avas cruci- 
 fied. The legend of the death of the great god, Pan, which, according to 
 Plutarch, happened in the days of Tiberius, shows the same deep and 
 boding presentiment, in the ancient world that a great change was at 
 hand. 
 
 "At that time," it relates, "a ship, when off Corfu, was strangely be- 
 calmed, and, forthwith, the Egyptian helmsman, Thamnus, heard a loud 
 voice from the Echiuadian Islands call him by name, and bid him say, 
 when he got to Palodes, that the great god. Pan, was dead. The Egyptian 
 did as he was bidden, but scarcely had he called out his message over the 
 shore that had been named to him, when there rose, around, a great sigh- 
 ing, and a sound as of wonder, that filled the passengers with awe ; the 
 story, when it was told in Rome, troubling the Emperor Tiljerius and the 
 people not a little." The great Pan was, indeed, dead, and the other gods 
 wailed over his bier. The oracles and sacred utterances of the time 
 breathe a dark dread of a coming world-catastrophe. The bright day of 
 
 Q
 
 226 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 the Augustan age had long passed. Tlie aiv over Eome smelt of blood. 
 Murder and suicide were the fashion, and even women Avere not safe from 
 the daggei'. Financial distress brought want to the mass. Even the 
 provinces suffered by the awful monetary crisis. In Palestine, men saw 
 their future king, Agrippa, reduced to the greatest straits for money, 
 borrowing where he could, glad to accept funds secretly offered to gain 
 his influence, — for a time dependent for his very food on Herod Ant ipas, 
 and, in the end, a fugitive from his usurious creditors. The debtor, the 
 creditor, and the jail, which recur so often in the parab^.es, were illustra- 
 tions only too vividly realized by the people at large. It was a time of 
 change, transition, universal doubt, uncertainty, and expectation. In the 
 heathen world, men did not know what to tliink of the future ; in Judea, 
 they looked for the sudden appearance of the Messiah. The drama of 
 ancient society had been played out ; a vast empire had risen on the ruins 
 of the nationalities that had, hitherto, kept men apart, and its triumphs 
 had discredited the local gods, to whom men had everywhere looked for 
 protection. A calm had followed ages of universal war between city and 
 city, and state and state, and had revolutionized life. Corruption and 
 oppression had followed in the Avake of dominion, and had filled the world 
 with vague longings for a higher morality, and the hopes of a nobler 
 religion than the decayed systems around them. The very triumph of 
 one power over all others had, indeed, before all things besides, opened 
 the way for the new faith of Christ. The isolation of hostile races bad 
 been broken down, and the dim but magnificent conception of a brother- 
 hood of men, though, as yet, only as subjects of a universal despotism, had 
 risen in the mind of all peoples. The highways of Kome invited com- 
 munication with all lands ; her government and laws guaranteed order 
 and safety wherever they obtained ; but, above all, she had prepared the 
 world for a religion which should address all humanity, by levelling the 
 innumerable barriers of rival nationality — with their jealousies and im- 
 penetrable prejudices, and linking all races into a single grand federa- 
 tion, with common sympathies, and as fellow-citizens of the same great 
 dominion. 
 
 It was amidst such a state of things, when the fabric of society seemed 
 dissolving, and the new world had not yet risen from the chaos of the old, 
 that the destined herald of a new moral order was born, apparently, in 
 Hebron. The son of a pure and worthy priest— John, the future Baptist, 
 was, from his birth, surrounded by the influences raiost fitted to develope a 
 saintly character. Of priestly descent, on his mother's side as well as his 
 father's, he began life with all the advantages of an ancient ancestry, every 
 link of which in the eyes of a Jew, was noble. In the society of Hebron, 
 his parents would have a prominent position, and their young son must 
 have been surrounded, on their account, with the respect which insensibly 
 educates and refines. His early education, received at the hands of his 
 father and mother, would take the colour of their position and training. 
 The child would hear, from his infancy, the history of his people, and of 
 the great priestly race whose blood ran in his veins. His genealogy waa 
 no doubtful conjecture, but clear and well established through fourteen
 
 THE KINGDOM OP HEAVEN IS AT HAND. 227 
 
 centuries, Hglited up, at intervals, by traditions of famous names, and as 
 famous deeds. The child of strict observers of the Law, he woTild grow 
 up with a religious reverence for its minutest prescriptions, its feasts and 
 fasts, its Sabbaths and new moons, its ten thousand rules on meats and 
 drinks, dress, furniture, dishes, conversation, reading, travelling, meeting, 
 parting, buying, selling, cooking, the washing of pots, cups, tables, and 
 person — that slavery of ritualism to which pious Jews gave a trembling 
 and anxious obedience. From his earliest years he would feel that he 
 could not eat, driiik, clotlie himself, wash his hands or feet, batlio, or pei*- 
 form the most secret function, exce^it by set rules. He would be ti'ained 
 in the ideas of the system into which he had been born, which mapped out 
 his every act, and word, and thought, and denounced every deviation from 
 the all-embracing rules of Eabljinism as a sin, fatal to his caste as a Jew. 
 
 Born in the priestly rank, and, therefore, himself a destined priest here- 
 aftci% John would early learn all the details of the Temple service, and, 
 doubtless, often went with his parents to the Temple, the glittering pin- 
 nacles of which he could see from Hebron. The countless pilgrims at the 
 great feasts ; the solemnities of the altar, with its turbaued, white-robed, 
 bare-footed priests ; the swelling music of the Levites, who, each morning, 
 sang the psalms of the day, in the inner court, to the accompaniment of 
 citherns, harps, and cymbals, and the deep roll of the great Temple organ, 
 whose music the Eabbis, with fond exaggeration, spoke of as heard at 
 Jericho, — would be familiar and dear to him, and the splendour of the 
 newly built Temple, resplendent in snowy marble and gold, would kindle 
 at once his pride and affection. We all rise to manhood coloured by the 
 influences around us, and these in his case all tended to the narrowest 
 Judaism. Living almost under the shadow of the Temple, he was in the 
 centre of whatever was most rigid and intolerant ; unlike Jesus, whose 
 Galilasan home kept him in a freer air, far from the dead conservatism of 
 the Temple city, and from the bigotiy of its schools and people. 
 
 But though thus, by birth, education, and circumstances, naturally a 
 strict and rigid Jew, higher inspirations than those of mere formalism 
 surrounded John from his birth. His father and mother were both 
 righteous before God, in a higher sense than that of Eabbinical blameless- 
 ness. Their religion was deep and sincere, for they were among the 
 remnant in Israel who fulfilled the sacred ideal of the Divine require- 
 ments : they did justly, loved mercy, and walked humbly with their God. 
 Their son inherited their finest characteristics. Even from childhood he 
 showed his religious bias. The only son of a priest, he might have passed 
 through life with flattering respect, in the enjoyment of a modest plenty, 
 but he early caught the spirit of the heroes of his race, of v/hom he heard 
 and read so much in the ancient Scriptures. Disdaining self-indulgent 
 ease, his soul kindled under the influence of home, of the times, and of 
 religion, into a fervent enthusiasm, which found its loftiest conception of 
 life in asceticism and joyful self-sacrifice. Always more or less in favour 
 Vv'ith his race, this tendency Avas moi"e frequent in the Jewish priesthood 
 than in any other of antiqiiity. Feeling the pulses of spiritual excitement 
 which throbbed through the people around hira : pondering their suffer-
 
 228 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 ings, tlieiv sins, and tlicir liopes, John gave himself up, though of priestly 
 birth, to the higher mission oi: a prophet, and devoted his life to the reform 
 of the evils he so deeply deplored, and to the revival of the religion of his 
 fathers. 
 
 His course was, doubtless, in some measure, determined by an act of his 
 parents before his birth. They had made a vow in his name that he should 
 be a Nazaritc all his life, and had thus marked him out as one formally 
 devoted to God, and he freely adopted the vow. The Nazarite, among the 
 Jews, was one, of either sex, consecrated to God as peculiarly Ilis. The 
 conception was the natural development, in earnest spirits, of the self- 
 mortification, for religious ends, by fasts and the like, common to all 
 Eastern races. It had been practised in Israel from the earliest tinaes, 
 and is already formulated in the Book of Numbers as a recognised 
 institution. The Wazarite was required to abstain altogether from Avine 
 and intoxicating drinks, even from vinegar, or any syrup or preparation of 
 the grape, and from grapes themselves, and raisins. All the days of his 
 Nazariteship he was to eat nothing made of the vine, from the kernels to 
 the husk. " No razor was to come upon his head ; " he was to " be holy," 
 and to let the locks of the hair of his head grow. To guard against any 
 legal doiilcment from a corpse, he was to go near no dead body, even if it 
 were that of his father, mother, brother, or sister, because the consecration 
 of God was on his head : and, if by chance, death came where he was, the 
 defilement could only be removed by a seven days' " uncleanness," to be 
 followed by shaving his head, and presenting a special trespass-offering. 
 His vow was, moreover, regarded as broken, and he had to begin its ful- 
 filment again. 
 
 A Nazarite^ vow was commonly made for a fixed time, but parents might 
 vow for their infant or even unborn children, that they should be Nazaritcs 
 for life. It was thus in the case of John ; it had been so with Samuel and 
 Samson, and tradition tells us it was so in the case of James the Just, the 
 brother of our Lord. But though consecrated to God, and marked as such 
 by s]iccial signs, the Nazarite was not a monk who withdrew wholly from 
 family, social, or civil life, and thus shut himself out from all useful 
 activity. The sound sense of early antiquity had no conception of such 
 selfish devotion. He only shunned certain aspects or parts of common 
 life, though some, of their own accord, carried self-denial farther. Not a 
 few retired into the desolation of the hills of southern Judea, and lived 
 rudely in caves, allowing themselves only the rough fare of the wilderness, 
 and the coarsest clothing. Others, like James the Just, used no oil for 
 anointing, though almost a necessary of life in warm countries, and ate no 
 fiesh. The shrinking avoidance of all Levitical defilement, which dictated 
 such mortifications, was held due to their special consecration to God, whom 
 this rigid ceremonial purity was supposed to honour. The shunning the 
 sight of the dead was but a repetition of what was required from the 
 Levitically holiest man of the nation— the high priest. The abstaining 
 from wine and strong driidc guarded against an offence doubly evil in one 
 who had given himself to God, and Avas a securiry for vigour and clearness 
 of mind in His service. The uncut hair was, perhaps, a visible sign of
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT IIAKD. 229 
 
 the sacred and iuviolaljlc surrender of tlic wliolo man to Jeliovab. TLio 
 hair was the symbol of manly vigour, its crown and ornament ; and its 
 untouched locks thus symbolized the consecration of the reason and higher 
 powers to God. Thus especially " holy," the life-long ISTazarite stood on 
 an equality with a priest, and might enter the inner Temple, as Ave see in 
 the instance of James the Just. 
 
 The Nazarito vow was often taken to secure some wish — for health, 
 safety, or success — from God. But where it was life-long, no such selfish 
 aims could be cherished. In lower cases, like that of Samson, there might 
 he a vague craving for special favour from God, but in such as that of 
 John, the impelling motive was intense desire after the highest religious 
 attainments. It was in him a visible and enduring protest against the 
 worldliness and spiritual indifPerence of mankind at lai-go. 
 
 The time of Samson and Samuel, towards the close of the period of the 
 Judges, seems to have been that of the greatest glory of Is'azaritism, which 
 prepared the way for the grander era of the prophets, beginning with 
 Samuel, and for the great spiritual movement of the reign of the first kings. 
 Less than two hundred years after David, however, Amos laments the 
 mockery with which the people treated it. Yet Nazarites must always 
 liave been numerous in Israel, for the duplicity of the Eabbi Simeon 
 Ben Shetach, in regard to the sacrifices required to discharge three 
 hundred Nazarites from their vow, was the first cause of his disastrous 
 quarrel with Alexander Jannteus. Even two hundred years before, the 
 vitality of the institution must have declined. " I never, through life," 
 said Simeon the Just, at that time, " liked to taste the trespass-ofEering of 
 a Nazarite. Once, however, a man of the south came to me who had made 
 the Nazarite vow. I looked at him. He had glorious eyes, a noble face, 
 and his hair fell over his shoulders in great waving masses. ' "Why do 
 you wish to cut off this magnificent hair, and be a ISTazarite no longer ? ' I 
 asked him. ' I am shepherd to my father,' said he, ' in the town where I 
 live. One day, in drawing water from the spring, I saw my likeness below, 
 and felt a secret pride. An evil thought began to lay hold on me and 
 destroy me. Then, I said. Wicked creature ! you would fain be proud of 
 what is not yours, and ought to be no more to you than dust and worth- 
 lessness ; I vow to my God that I shall cut off my hair for His glory.' " 
 " Fortliwith," continued Simeon, "I embraced him and said, 'Would that 
 we had many Nazarites like thee in Israel.' " 
 
 The instinct which has led men, in every religion, and in all ages, to 
 adopt an ascetic life, doubtless springs from the belief, that self-denial and 
 the subjugation of the body leave the soul more free to attend to its special 
 interests. Buddhism is a system of self-mortification, and Brahmanism 
 has its Yogus, or devotees, who aspire, by the renunciation of all that can 
 make life pleasant, to attain union with the Supreme Spirit. Mohammed- 
 anism has its fakirs, who seek to subdue the flesh by their austerities, and to 
 strengthen the soul by contemplation and prayer. Tlie Egyptian priests 
 passed their novitiate in the deserts, where, like John, they lived in caves. 
 " The priests in Ileliopolis," says Plutarch, " bring no v/inc into the temple, 
 as it is not seemly to drink by day, whilst the Lord and King, Helios (the
 
 230 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 sun), looks on ; the others drink wine, but very little. They have many 
 fasts, during which they refrain from wine, and continuously meditate on 
 divine things, learn, and teach them." 
 
 Eeaction from the corruption around, the weariness of the world, natural 
 in a period of universal unquiet and uncertainty, and the wish to follow out 
 the letter of the Law exactly, had led to the adoption of an austere life by 
 many in Palestine. As the ISTazarites strove to attain ideal ceremonial purity 
 in rude isolation, others sought it in brotherhoods. Josephus classes as one 
 of the four great parties of his day, the Essenes, an order numbering about 
 4,000 members, in Syria and Palestine, more or less devoted to an ascetic 
 life. Like the Pharisees, they were a development of the zeal for the Law 
 which had first marked the Hasidim, in the Maccabasan wars. The feverish 
 anxiety to avoid Levitical defilement, which had already given rise to 
 Pharisaism, found its extreme expression in these ultra rigid legalists, who 
 hoped, by isolation, to attain ceremonial righteousness, impossible in the 
 open world. The strictness and asceticism of others, appeared only a 
 hypocritical effeminacy in their severer eyes. But, even with them, there 
 were grades of strictness, for only the most rigid withdrew from society. 
 The Pharisees had had brotherhoods and unions for generations, and in 
 Egypt there were colonies of " Therapeutse," who lived a lonely, contem- 
 plative, idle life in the desert, coming together only for common worship 
 and holy meals. But the Essenes were as far from the saintly idleness 
 of the one, as from the restless demagogue activity of the others. 
 The Pharisees, as years passed on, had become constantly less entitled to 
 the name of the Separated, since they eagerly courted the multitude, and 
 compassed sea and land to make a proselyte, and frequented the street 
 corners and public places, to make a show of their piety. Ideal legal 
 purity could not be attained by such a life, and hence members who aspired 
 to a higher standard, withdrew, to form sacred colonies by themselves. 
 
 The rise of these desert colonies is not known, but the wanderer over the 
 district between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, in the days of John, came, 
 here and there, on such settlements, in the narrow, shady wadys, some- 
 times green in their hollows, v^'hich sink in great numbers from the high 
 stony plateau, towards the Dead Sea. The sad appearance of these re- 
 cluses, their life strictly regulated by the Law, in the least detail, gave 
 them the air of people weary of life, who had withdrawn from the world 
 to prepare for death. They seem to have given themselves up to a life-long 
 penance, in hope of gaining heaven. 
 
 The upper valley of Engedi, where Pliny tells us most of the Essenes 
 had settled, was exactly suited for the monkish life they had chosen. A 
 zigzag path leads from the wilderness of Judea, about three hours north 
 of Masada, by a steep descent of fully 1,500 feet, over loose rocks and 
 stones, to a rich spring, which makes its way, under a luxuriant growth of 
 shrubs^ and bushes, to the Dead Sea. The name Engedi, "the goat's 
 spring," may well have been given from the wild goats havin"- first found
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND. 231 
 
 that suited them. Each colony had its own synagogue, its common hall 
 for meals and assemblies, and its provision for daily baths in running 
 water. Besides these settlers, there were lonely hermits, living near soli- 
 tary mountain springs, to be able to secure their ceremonial purity still 
 better than their brethren, by more frequent bathing. These anchorets, 
 the precursors of the Christian monks, lived solely on the wild plants of 
 the hill-sides, but, yet, were frequently surrounded by large numbers of 
 disciples, who adopted their painful discipline. Colonies were also formed 
 in various outlying towns of Judea, the members maintaining the same 
 rites as their brethren, and having always Levitically piu'e accommodation 
 fi)r them when they wandered from the hillj. It seems as if the order 
 had originally lived wholly among men, and had only gTadually retired to 
 more or less complete seclusion, as dread of defilement grew more intense. 
 
 Their whole day was spent in labour in the field, or in the care of cattle, 
 or in that of bees, and in other useful industries. They thus provided 
 nearly all they wanted, buying what little they required besides, through 
 a special officer. They neither bought nor sold among themselves, but 
 exchanged as each required, and they would hardly use coin, from its 
 bearing an image. 
 
 The supreme end of their retirement, either in associations or as solitary 
 hermits, vv'as to keep the Mosaic law with all possible strictness. They 
 read it not only on the Sabbath, but day and night, all other reading being 
 forbidden. To blaspheme the name of Moses was the highest crime, punish- 
 able with death, and to give up his Books was a treacheiy which no Essene 
 would commit, even under the agonies of torture or death. 
 
 The superstitious dread of defilement, which required the cups and 
 platters of one company of Pharisees to be cleansed for the use of another, 
 was carried even further by the Essenes. In imitation of the priestly meals 
 in the Temple, from which the " unclean " were scrupulously excluded, 
 they had common meals, morning and evening, before and after the day's 
 work ; all novices till the third year, and all who were not of the order, 
 being excluded as Levitically unclean. The dining hall was as sacred as 
 a synagogue, the vessels and dishes purified with sleepless care, and even 
 the clothing worn during the meals was counted holy. Priests invoked 
 a blessing over the food, and it was eaten in reverent silence. Whoever 
 became members of the order, gave up all they possessed to it, and the 
 common stock thus obtained, added to the fruit and earnings of the general 
 labour, were shared by all ; the old and sick receiving the tenderest care. 
 
 The earnestness of the order showed itself in its principles. The novices 
 had to promise " to honour God, to be righteous towards man, to injure no 
 one, either at the bidding of another or of their own accord, to hate evil, 
 to promote good, to be faithful to every one, especially those in authority, 
 to love the truth, to unmask liars, and to keep the hand from theft, and 
 the conscience from unrighteous gain." Slavery was forbidden, and no 
 oaths permitted, save those by which members were admitted to the order. 
 War, and. even the manufacture of weaj^ons, was held unlawful, nor would 
 they use animal food, since the Law said, "Thou shalt not kill." Trade, 
 except so far as their simple wants required, was discountenanced.
 
 232 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 But if tlicir morality, drawn from tlie Old Testament, was pure and lofty, 
 their slavish devotion to ceremonial observances marked them as the most 
 superstitious of their nation. There were four grades of Levitical " clean- 
 ness," through which the novice rose only by a long and stern probation, 
 and the touching of a member of a higher grade by one of a lower, was 
 defilement that needed to be washed away by a bath. Priests washed their 
 hands and feet before any sacred rite, but the Essenes bathed their Avhole 
 body in cold water before every meal, and all they ate must be prepared 
 by one of their own number. They bathed, also, each morning, before 
 uttering the name of God. On Sabbaths, they would not even move any 
 vessel from its place, and they prepared all their food on Friday, to avoid 
 kindling a fire on the sacred day. They refused to eat flesh or wine, 
 partly from fear of defilement, partly because they wished to reproduce in 
 their whole lives the strictness of the Nazarites, of the priests during their 
 ministrations, and of the old Eechabites. Thus, their only food was that 
 prescribed to others for fasts. They kept aloof from the Temple, though 
 they sent the usual gifts — for the presentation of an offering involved par- 
 taking in a sacrificial meal, which would have defiled them. In some of 
 their colonies women were not suffered, from tlie same dread of unclean- 
 ness, and though they did not wholly forbid marriage, the wife was required 
 to undergo even more ceremonial cleansings than the brethren. They 
 kept a watchful guard that no one was defiled by the spittle of another, 
 and that it did not fall on the right side. The anointing oil, which was to 
 other Jews a festal luxury, in which the Psalmist had gloried as dropping 
 from Aaron's beard, was, to the Essene, an uncleanness, which needed to 
 be washed away ; a brother, expelled from the order, would rather starve 
 to death than touch food pre2:)ared by a common Jew, nor would any 
 Eoman torture force him to lose his caste. The whole life of an Essene 
 was a long terror of defilement. The work of the colony began before sun- 
 rise, with psalms and hymns, followed by prayer and washing. They then 
 went to their day's work. At eleven— the fifth hour — the scattered 
 labourers gathered again for a common bath in cold water. The woollen 
 dress in which they worked was now laid aside, and the consecrated dress 
 of the order put on, in preparation for their eating together, and their 
 meal, which consisted only of bread and a single kind of vegetable, was 
 eaten with prayer, in solemn stillness. The holy dress was then laid aside, 
 and work resumed. In the evening, the second meal Avas taken, with the 
 same solemnities and rites, and worship closed the day, that only pure 
 thoughts might fill their souls as they reth-ed to rest. One day followed 
 another, with the monotony of pendulum beats, in precisely the same 
 round of unbend in q- forms. 
 
 The Essenes, as the mystics of Judaism, naturally gave themselves to 
 metaphysical speculations, and, like the Eabbis, they revelled in fantastic 
 allegorizing of Scripture. From the philosophic Judaism of Alexandria, 
 thoy borrowed notions on free will and fate, and from Persia and Greece, 
 with both of which their race had been, for long periods, in contact, they 
 adopted various dogmas. The soul, they imagined, was a sul>tle ether, of 
 heavenly origin, drawn down to earth by a fell necessity, and imprisoned
 
 THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IS AT HAND. 233 
 
 in the body till set free at death. It was then borne away, if pure, beyond 
 the ocean, to a region where storms were unknown, and where the heat 
 vi-as tempei-ed by a gentle west wind, perpetually blowing from the ocean. 
 If it had neglected the Law, however, it was carried off to a dark, wintry 
 abyss, to dwell there for over. Every morning, the Essenes paid homage 
 to the sun, and they would not, at any time, let its beams fall on anything 
 Levitically unclean. 
 
 The community of goods among them was a necessity of their mode of 
 life, since the order alone could supply the wants of its members. It had 
 the result of enforcing simplicity. An under garment, without sleeves, 
 was their only clothing in summer, and a rough mantle their prophet-like 
 winter garb. The inter-relation of the different colonies made money 
 useless in travelling, for there was no need of it when, at each resting- 
 place, their frugal wants were freely supplied by any brother. They had 
 no servants, and, as they recognised no distinction but that of " clean and 
 unclean," they could have no slaves. 
 
 The grand aim of this amazing system of self-denial and ascetic endur- 
 ance is told by Josephus, in a brief sentence. " Consecrated, from child- 
 hood, by many puriiications, and familiar, beyond thought, with the Holy 
 Books, and the utterances of the prophets, they claim to see into the 
 future, and, in truth, there is scarcely an instance in which their prophecies 
 have been found false." The belief that they could attain direct communion 
 with God, by intense legal purification and mystic contemplation, and even 
 pass, in the end, to such transcendental vision as would reveal to them 
 the secrets of the future, was the supreme motive to endure a life of so 
 much privation and self-denial. A similar course had been followed, before 
 their day, as a means of preparation for Divine visions, and communion 
 with higher powers. " In those days," says Daniel, " I was mourning 
 three full weeks. I ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor wine in 
 my mouth, neither did I aiioint myself at all, till three whole weeks were 
 fulfilled. And in the four-and-twentieth day of the first month, as I was 
 by the side of the great river, which is Hiddekel, then I lifted up mine 
 eyes, and looked, and behold a certain man clothed in linen, whose loins 
 were girded with fine gold of Uphaz." In the same way, Esdras prepared 
 himself, beforehand, for his visions—" Go to the flowery open, where there 
 is no house," said the angel to him, " and eat only the herbs of the field ; 
 taste no flesh, drink no wine, but eat herbs only, and pray unto the Highest 
 continually ; then will I come and talk with thee." 
 
 It was universally believed that the future was open before the aged 
 members of the order, who had laboured after " purity " through life. 
 Their souls were supposed to be well-nigh freed from the bonds of the 
 flesh, and able to wander forth to the world beyond. Thus an Essene was 
 said to have prophesied to the brother of the first Aristobulus that prince's 
 death ; and another to have predicted to the boy Herod that he would be 
 king, and that he would have a long reign, after he had gained the crown. 
 This gift of prophecy was believed by Herod and his sons, no less than 
 among the people, and hence an Essene was often sent for when a bad 
 dream disturbed royalty, or anxiety for the future troubled it. "With such
 
 234 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 mystic claims, tlie expectations of Israel must Lave boin tlieir cliicf 
 thouglit. Their old men dreamed dreams, their young men saw visions, 
 and tlicir sons and daughters prophesied, as if in f ullilment of the prophet's 
 signs of the coming of the Messiah. Yet we have no proof that they 
 anticipated it as near, or applied themselves in any practical way to a 
 preparation of Israel for it. It was only a fond and airy vision of tlie ideal 
 future. They were rigid Predestinarians, believing that all things, in the 
 course of nature and'in the life of man, are fixed by fate. Where there 
 was no moral freedom, it was idle either to preach or teach, and so they 
 did neither. 
 
 As was natural with minds occupied mainly with subjects above human 
 grasp, the speculations of the order became wild, and often monstrous. 
 The novice was required by a fearful oath to conceal the secret names of 
 the angels, which were known to the brotherhood, and gave him who 
 leax-ned them, power, by pronouncing them, to draw down these awful 
 beings from heaven. The Apocryphal literature of the day boasted of 
 long lists of the names of angels, v/ith their poAvers and offices ; and the 
 Essenes, like the Eabbis, believed that by secret spells, in which these 
 names played a foremost part, they could command their services for good 
 or evil, as the services of the genii are at the command of the magicians 
 in the Arabian Nights. They believed also, in common with the age, in 
 the secret magic powers of plants and stones, and they held much, besides, 
 the disclosure of which was the greatest of crimes. Secrecy was, indeed, 
 a characteristic of the order. The neophyte bound himself by a terrible 
 oath, "neither to conceal anything from the brotherhood, nor to discover 
 any of their doctrines to others, even if he should have to die for liis 
 refusal. He had, moreover, to swear that he would commiTnicate their 
 doctrines to no one, exce]3t as he himself had received them, and that he 
 would keep inviolably secret the books of the order, and the names of the 
 angels." 
 
 The influence of Essenism on the age, howevei', was small, for its 
 members were few in proportion to the teeming population, and made no 
 attempt at propagandism, but lived entirely apart from men. The natural 
 product of the times, with its Messianic hopes, its striving after legal 
 righteousness, its glorification of the past, and its contact with heathea 
 superstition, it served the purpose, in some measure, of drawing away the 
 thoughts from the dream of national political glory, and of preparing the 
 soil for the more spiritual conception of the Messiah, which John and 
 Jesus were to introduce. The Essenes came in contact with the people 
 as healers, prophets, dream-interpreters, and exorcists, not as teachers 
 or preachers. Their religious exercises and pure ideas were cherished 
 in the community without an attempt to spread them through the nation; 
 in marked contrast to the Ba,ptist, whose life was a fervent ministry 
 to the masses of his countrymen, and, still more, to Jesus, for He lived 
 in constant contact with men, even those shunned alike by Essene and 
 Eabbi, as unclean : showed the most perfect superiority to all ritual 
 narrowness ; set light by ceremonial purity, or superstitious Sabbath 
 laws ; discarded fasting ; took part in the social enjoyment of feasts, and
 
 THE VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS. 235 
 
 meals, and marriages, and. left a new code of rules and maxims for His 
 disciples. Essenism was, at l^cst, only the vivid cnlmination of the past, 
 doomed to jmss away. 
 
 From their lofty morality, the Essenes have been assigned a rank 
 among the spiritual forces of their age, to wliich in reality they had no 
 claim. If their moral purity and spiritual depth breathed of the prophets 
 rather than the theocracy, and made their order, in so far, a herald of 
 Christianity, their exaggerated ceremonialism, their harsh austerity, and 
 their fantastic and half-heathen superstitions, neutralized, to a large ex- 
 tent, this healthy influence. Still, in some directions, they surpassed in 
 true morality anything in the last centuries of Jewish life. It gives even 
 their harsh asceticism a higher dignity, that it was not, like that of the 
 Pharisees, a mercenary service for external reward, but a self-denying 
 attempt to keep out evil from the soul, and thus prepare it for that high 
 communion with God, in whose sacred calm the still small voice of Divine 
 revelations gi'ows audible. For the first time since the prophets, the 
 spiritual condition of the soul was declared to be the end of religion. 
 AVhile the Eabbis distracted the age with their fierce party strifes about 
 the merely external, another kind of life ripened in the seclusion of the 
 colonies of Essenes, which bore better fruit, because it concerned itself 
 with the need of a ISTew Birth, and the circumcision of the heart ; not witli 
 the theocracy, the Temple, or politics. The likeness to Christianity> 
 where it exists in Essenism, was not in its institutions, but in the quiet 
 and meditative frame that breathed through the community, in its religious 
 seriousness and priestly consecration of life — the " daily keeping of Sab- 
 bath," which was also the ideal of the first Christian communions. 
 These characteristics of the order were, in some degree, common also to 
 tliose who, after them, were " the quiet and peaceful in the land," although 
 its doctrines and ideas offered, otherwise, rather a contrast to Christianity 
 than a resemblance. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 THE VOICE IX THE WELDERNESS. 
 
 NO one is unaffected by the spirit of his age. It is not surprising, 
 therefore, that at a time when religious earnestness found expression 
 in the ascetic self-denial and retirement from the world, of Nazaritest 
 Essenes, and even of others not connected v,^ith either, the young enthusiast 
 of Hebron withdrew from his family and mankind, to the caves of the 
 wilderness stretching away from his native town. In an age so troubled 
 in politics and religion, the peaceful simplicity of such a hermit life was 
 irresistible, and in its calm retirement men could work out their salvation 
 by prayer, fasts, washings, and rigid zeal for the Law, with no one to 
 make them afraid. Tlie weary heart found repose in a solitude, where 
 the great woi'ld, with its discord, t--rmoil, and confusion, its cruelty, 
 selfishness, and treachery, was shui vat. The psalm-singing, the cere-
 
 236 THE LIFE OF CHIIIST. 
 
 monies, and the quiet industry of the colonies of Esscncs, sent strange 
 emotions of gentleness and awe into men's hearts, in an age when, every- 
 -\vhere else, wickedness reigned triumphant. In such dark days these 
 spots shone with a holy light. Having fled, in horror, from prevalent 
 violence and sin,— by the natural law of reaction, the fugitives sought to 
 extinguish in themselves the simplest instincts of human nature. It was 
 thus, afterwards, in the awful times of the dissolution of the Eoman 
 empire. The deserts of Egypt and Syria were filled with a strange 
 poj)ulation, fleeing from the wild tumult and commotion under which the 
 earth reeled. It was thus, also, in the fierce and lawless Middle Ages, 
 when the cloister was like a speck of blue in a heaven of storm. Asceti- 
 cism, in these different periods, as in that of the Gospel history, was the 
 only protest which told with sufficient force against the rampant evil 
 around. Eleven centuries after Christ, a similar state of society made the 
 ascetic life the ideal of the noblest souls, even where they did not with- 
 draw from the world. St. Bernard's saintly mother, the model of 
 Christian charity and lowliness, could not rest satisfied with these graces. 
 By scantiness of food, by simplicity of dress, by the avoidance of worldly 
 pleasures, by fasting, prayer, and vigils, she strove after that vision of 
 self-sacrifice and humility, which alone was attractive in that ago. 
 Asceticism is not needed now. Its place has been more nobly filled by the 
 claims of Christian work for others, but in John the Baptist's day, and for 
 long centuries after, it was a natural tendency. 
 
 The wilderness to which John withdrew stretches, far and near, over 
 the whole eastern part of Judca, beginning almost at Jerusalem, and 
 reaching away, under different names, to the Dead Sea and the southern 
 desert, as its distant limits. It is a dreary waste of rocky valleys ; in 
 some pai'ts stern and terrible— the rocks cleft and shattered by earth- 
 quakes and convulsions, into rifts and gorges sometimes a thousand feet 
 in depth, though only thirty or forty in width ; in others, stretching out 
 in bare chalk hills full of caves, or in white, flint-bound ridges, and winding, 
 muddy wadys, with an occasional reservoir, hewn in the hard limestone, to 
 supply water in a country destitute of springs. One may travel all day, 
 and see no other life than the desert partridge, and a chance fox or vulture. 
 Only the dry and fleshy plants which require no water, grow on the hills, 
 and in the vallej^s the most luxuriant vegetation is the Avhite broom 
 bushes, which blossom in March and April. The whole district is, in fact, 
 the slope of the midland chalk and limestone hills, from their highest 
 point of nearly 3,000 feet, near Hebron, to 1,000 or 1,500 feet at the valley 
 of the Dead Sea. The Hebrews fitly call it Jeshimon — " the appalling 
 desolation," or " horror " — for it is not possible to conceive a more 
 desolate region. Parts of it are deserted even by the Arabs. On the 
 northern side, valleys of great depth, sinking towards the Dead Sea, al- 
 most preclude travelling except in their troughs, and farther south, the 
 country is absolutely im]3assable. Huge perpendicular gorges, of from a 
 thousand to fifteen hundred feet in depth, and in some places nearly a mile 
 in width, have been holloAvcd out by the great torrents, rushing in winter 
 over the precipices', towards the Dead Sea. The one natural site for a
 
 THE VOICE IN THE WILDEENESS. 237 
 
 town, in the Avhole district, is tlie opening at the foot of tlie pass of 
 Engcdi, " the spring of the wild goats," above the shores of the sea, and 
 this is reached only by a narrow, serpent-like path, down cliffs twelve 
 hnndred feet higli, — well named by the Hebrews, "the rocks of the wild 
 goats," — which only unladen beasts, by an hour's slow care, can descend 
 in safety. Excepting the spring at this spot, water is to be found only in 
 hollows of the rocks, or in the very rare water-cisterns, hewn in past ages 
 in the limestone, which catch some of the few passing showers which visit 
 this region. 
 
 This Spring of Engedi — or Ain Jidy, gushes from beneath a rock on a 
 little plateau, 400 feet above the Dead Sea, and 800 feet below the top of 
 the cliifs. The water is sweet and clear, but unpleasantly warm to the 
 taste. The stream flows in a long cascade over the steep face of the cliff, 
 and is lost in channels for irrigation, beneath, — low bushes, bending 
 rushes, and the gigantic leaves of the osher, the yellow berries of the apple 
 of Sodom, and the flat cedar-like tops of the thorny Darda'ra, rising in a 
 thicket along its course. Bulbuls and hopping thrushes court this shelter, 
 and black grakles, with golden wings, and melodious note, flit to and fro 
 on the cliffs above. On cvei-y side, below the spring, ruined garden walls 
 and terraces, and a large terraced mound, show the site of the ancient 
 town, which had, perhaps, a thousand iiihabitants. The scenery along the 
 lake is magnificent in its wild and desolate grafideur. Beneath, is the 
 blue water of the Dead Sea ; above, rise the tall ci'ags and castellated 
 precipices of the great rock-wall, which runs, ever higher and steeper, 
 nearly to the fortress of Masada, the square isolated mass of which, more 
 than 1,500 feet above the Dead Sea, forms a great plateau, cut off on every 
 side by wide rifts, and vertical walls of rock, and seen from Engedi. On 
 the east, beyond the deep gorges of the Arnon, and lesser streams of the 
 Blue Mountains, the white towers of Kerak look down from a great cliff 
 which seems to defy approach. 
 
 The town of Engedi was the one minute living spot in the whole district, 
 for the only human habitations in the Avild region above were the hill 
 caves, in which hermits sought a miserable shelter. Somewhere in the 
 chasm leading down to the spring, the Essenes had their little colony in 
 John's day, but their strict isolation left the lonely anchorite in a deeper 
 solitude. In the neighbouring wilderness, where the venomous desert 
 viper glided among the stones, and the scorpion, the fox, the vulture, or 
 the raven, were almost the only signs of life ; where clronght reigned, and 
 the waterless hills and stony valleys were symbols of utter desolation, — 
 in some cave, perhaps, in the depth of a deep and narrow ravine, that at 
 least gave shelter from the pitiless heat and glare of an Eastern sun,— 
 John took up his abode, to be alone with God and his own soul, and thus, 
 the better able to fulfil the lifelong vow which separated hiin from men. 
 Bred up a strict Jew, and trained, like St. Paul, in the perfect knowledge 
 and observance of the Law, he was doubtless, also, a zealot towards God 
 in all things respecting it. At what age he retired from Hebron to this 
 hermit life we have no means of knowing, but he had, apparently, lived 
 for many years apart from men before his public appearance. Tlie Gospels
 
 238 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 furnish us with vivid glimpses of his appearance and mode of life. His 
 hair hung long about him, like that of Samson, for it had never been cut 
 since his birth. His only food was the locusts which leaped or flew on the 
 bare hills, and the honey of wild bees which he found here and there in 
 the clefts of the rocks, and his only drink a draught of water from some 
 rocky hollow. Locusts are still the food of the poor in many parts of the 
 East. " All the Bedouins of Arabia, and the inhabitants of towns in Nedj 
 and Hedjaz, are accustomed to cat them," says Burckhardt. " I have seen 
 at Medina and Tayf, locust shops, where they arc sold by measure. In 
 Egypt and J^ubia they are eaten only by the poorest beggars. The Arabs, 
 in preparing them for eating, throw them alive into boiling water, with 
 which a good deal of salt has been mixed, taking them out after a few 
 minutes, and drying them in the sun. The head, feet, and wings, are then 
 torn off, the bodies cleansed from the salt, and perfectly dried. They are 
 sometimes eaten boiled in buttei', or spread on nnleavened bread mixed 
 with butter." In Palestine, they are eaten only by the Arabs on the ex- 
 treme frontiers ; elsewhere they are looked on with disgust and loathing, 
 and only the very poorest use them. Tristram, hov/evcr, spepJvs of them 
 as "very palatable." "I fonnd them vciy good," says he, "when eaten 
 after the Arab fashion, stewed with butter. They tasted somevvhat like 
 shrimps, but with less flavour." In the wilderness of Judea, various kinds 
 abound at all seasons, and spring up, with a drumming sound, at every 
 step, suddenly spreading their bright hind wings, of scarlet, crimson, blue, 
 yellow, Avhite, green, or brown, according to the species. They wore 
 "clean," under tlie Mosaic Law, and hence could be eaten by John without 
 offence. The wild bees in Palestine are far more numerous than those 
 kept in hives, and the greater part of the honey sold in the southern dis- 
 tricts is obtained from wild swarms. Few countries, indeed, are better 
 adapted for bees. The dry climate, and the stunted but varied flora, con- 
 sisting largely of aromatic thymes, mints, and other similar plants, with 
 crocuses in the spring, are very favonrable to them, while the dry recesses 
 of the limestone rocks everywhere afford them shelter and protection for 
 their combs. In the wilderness of Judea especially, bees abound more 
 than in any other district, and honey is, to this day, part of the homely 
 diet of the local Bedouin, who squeeze it from the combs and store it in 
 skins. 
 
 John's dress was in keeping with the austerity of his life. A burnouse 
 of rough, rudely woven cloth of coarse camels' hair, such as the Bedouin 
 still wear, bound round his body by the common leathern girdle still in 
 use among the very poor, was apparently his only clothing. His head- 
 dress was the triangular head-cloth, kept in its place by a cord, as is still 
 the custom among the Arabs, and his feet were shod with coarse sandals. 
 In Hebron he had had aronnd him all that could m.ake life pleasant— a 
 saintly home, loving parents, social consideration, modest comforts, and 
 an easy outlook for the future. But the burden of life had weighed heavy 
 on him, and his heart was sad, and drove him forth from men. The 
 enemies of his people Avere strong, and the hand of them that hated them 
 lay sore upon them. The cry of the faithful in the land rose to God, that
 
 THE VOICE IN THE WILDEENESS. 239 
 
 lie would remember His holy covenant and deliver tlicm. They sighed to 
 be free from the presence of the heathen, that, once more under God as 
 their only king, with their country to themselves, they might serve Him 
 without fear, in the homage of the Temple, and the rites of the Law. 
 Israel had long sat in darkness, with no break of light from heaven. The 
 promises seemed to tai'ry. The godly sighed to have their feet guided 
 into the way of peace, but no Messiah had appeared to lead them. 
 
 33ut if the sorrows of the nation pressed on the heart of John, so also 
 did their sins. If the " shadov/ of death " thus lay on them, it was through 
 their own sins and degeneracy, for God had only forsaken them because 
 they had. first forsaken Him. The courts of His Temple had been turned 
 into a den of thieves ; the spiritual guides of the multitude were deceitful 
 and deadly as the vijoer of the desert ; blind leaders of a blind people. 
 They who should have been the holiest of the holy — God's priests — were a 
 scorn and derision for their unworthiness. Before John reached his 
 majority, he had seen the sacred mitre changed nine times, at the will of 
 Archelaus, or of a heathen governor from Eomc, and the puppet high 
 priests had desecrated its awful dignity by personal vice, or time-serving 
 policy, or indifference to its highest obligations, or shameful luxury and 
 haughty pride. Two of the house of Boethos of Alexandria, raised by 
 Herod to dignify his marriage into the family, had worn the high priest's 
 robes, but the people nauttered curses on them, for having surrounded 
 themselves with courtly show and military violence. Ismael the son of 
 rhal)i, had worn tliem, but the clubs of his retainers had become a bye- 
 word in Jerusalem, as had his own shameful personal luxury. Three 
 members of the family of Hannas had vforn them — Hannas himself, 
 Elcazar his son, and, now, Caiaphas his son-in-law, — and Hannas was still 
 the foremost man in Jerusalem, but they hated the people, and the people 
 hated them, and maintained that they hissed at them like vipers, in their 
 proud malignity, or glided to their evil ends, like the snake. Their 
 families were branded as sons of Eli. Iniquity filled the high places of 
 the Hill of God. Kor were the people themselves innocent; for He who 
 was meek and lowly in spirit denounced them,_a year or two later, as an 
 evil and adulterous genei"ation, more hardened and hopeless than IsTineveh, 
 or Sodom and Gomorrah, whicli God had cursed. Earnest souls, in such 
 circumstances, with the earth dark around them, and no light in the 
 heavens ; feeling that hope could only come with national contrition and 
 awakened spiritual life, might well, in loving, sad despair, withdraw them- 
 selves from mankind. 
 
 But with John there was also a conviction that the Messiah, long ex- 
 [)ectcd, must be near at hand, and that the fit preparation for His advent 
 was a self-denial and humiliation, which surrendered the whole present, 
 and gave itself up to prayer and watching, in desert solitudes. It was the 
 idea of His age, and John could be satisfied v/ith nothing less. A great 
 sorrow and a great ideal alike drove him to "keep his body under," as if 
 the least pleasure were sin, and the flesh the enemy of the soul. 
 
 Joscplius gives ns a sketch of one of the recluses of the desert, with 
 whom ho himself lived for three years. " His name was Banus, his home
 
 24:0 THE LIFE OF CHRIST, 
 
 the desert, his only clothing the leaves or bark of trees, his only food wlia*, 
 grew of its own accord, his only drink the brook, and his daily and niglitly 
 practice to bathe in cold water." Not a few snch, no donbt, bnried them- 
 selves in the dens and caves of the lonely hills ronnd John, weary of the 
 world, as Pliny says, and seeking, by a life of penitence, to cleanse away 
 the defilements of the flesh. 
 
 ■^Vith many, the great motive might be to save themselves in the ship- 
 wreck of all besides, bnt no snch nnworthy impulse actuated John. He 
 sought the wilderness, at once to secure perfect Levitical purity — for he 
 was a strict Jew— to ponder over the mysteries of the long-delayed king- 
 dom of God, and to aid in bringing about its accomplishment. His life, 
 earnestly striving after meetness for the expected Messianic kingdom, was 
 no vacant and idle solitude. He had nothing of the Eastei'n mystic, whose 
 cell witnesses only dreamy and selfish meditation. The struggles of soul, 
 in all natures like his, are unspeakably real, and we cannot doubt that his 
 days and nights saw him pleading, by long earnest prayer, with many 
 tears and soi-e fasting, that God, in His mercy, would at last send the 
 Messiah to His people. We know how even Christ, " in the days of His 
 flesh, offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears ; " 
 how He sighed deeply in His spirit, and spent whole nights in the hills, 
 or in the desert, in lonely prayer; and His herald must have felt, in liis 
 measure, the same all-absorbing zeal. The prophets and Kabbis, alike, 
 taught that the " Kingdom of Heaven " could only come when Israel had 
 prepared itself by humiliation and repentance, and John sought to rouse 
 men at large to feel this, by the protest against their sins embodied in his 
 example. To rebuke love of riches would have been idle, had he lived in 
 comfort ; to condemn the hollowness and unreality of life, he must be clear 
 of all suspicion of them himself. Men involuntarily do homage to self- 
 denying sincerity, and there could be no question as to that of John. It 
 was felt tliat he was real. Religion had become a thinoj of forms. Men 
 had settled into a round of externals, as if all religion centred in these. 
 Decencies and proprieties formed the substance of human life. But John 
 showed that there was, at, least, one man with whom religion was an ever- 
 lasting reality. 
 
 A soul lost, like that of John, in the greatness of eternal truths, may 
 well have risen to an indifference to the comforts, or even ordinary wants 
 of the body, otherwise almost impossible. We have no record of his daily 
 life, but the story of one who, in saintliness of spirit, trod in his steps, is 
 still preserved. Saint Antony, in the deserts of Egypt, was wont to pass 
 whole nights in prayer, and that not infref|uently, to the astonishment of 
 men. He ate once a day, after the setting of the sun; his food was bread 
 with salt, his drink nothing but water. Flesh and wine he never tasted. 
 When he slept, he was content with a rush mat, but mostly he lay on the 
 bare ground. He would not anoint himself with oil, saying that it was 
 more fit for young men to be earnest in subduing the body, than to seek 
 things which softened it. Forgetting the past, he, daily, as if beginning 
 afresh, took more pains to improve, repeating to himself, continually, the 
 Apostle's words— "Forgetting what is behind; stretching forth to what
 
 THE VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS. 241 
 
 is before ; " and mindful, too, of Elijah's saying, " The Lord liveth, beforo 
 wliom I stand " — lie thought in himself, that the ascetic ought ever to be 
 learning his own life from that of the great Elias, as from- a mirror. The 
 picture may not suit in some particulars, but as a glimpse of the mortified 
 life of the desert, in its best aspect, it may serve to realize that of John, in 
 the loneliness of the rough wilderness of Judea. 
 
 In its rugged solitudes, his soul gradually rose to the consciousness of 
 a great mission. He believed that the wrath of God was near at hand, to 
 take vengeance on the unrighteousness of men, but he knew that the God 
 of Abraham, even in wrath, remembers mercy, and that, with the judg- 
 ments, there would come the long-promised Deliverer. His impetuous 
 nature, and a heart that never feared the face of man, raised hinr to the 
 level of the old prophets, and impelled him, like them, to address his 
 generation. Instinct with the deepest religious feeling ; of a transparent 
 simplicity, and reverent truthfulness of word and bearing ; glowing with 
 energy ; a living embodiment of sincerity and self-denial, and in the best 
 position, from his earliest years, to know the age ; he was, above all men, 
 fitted to rouse the sleeping conscience of Israel, and to lay bare the self- 
 deceptions and sins of even the religionists of the day. Though a heredi- 
 tary priest, he had stood aloof from the Temple service, for its mechanical 
 rites gave him no inner peace. 
 
 From the Temple aristocracy he shrank with a special aversion, for the 
 guilt of the nation culminated in them. Under the mantle of legal purity, 
 and behind the cheap popular sanctity of the Pharisees, his c^uick eye saw, 
 at a glance, hateful ambition, greed, and hypocrisy. The nation itself 
 stirred his soul, as he saw it, in a time so earnest, contenting itself with 
 Pharisaic righteousness, and trusting, with insane self-complacency, to its 
 being the people of God. In his loneliness, his soul had communed much 
 with the prophets of the Old Covenant, and found in their holy zeal for 
 Israel and God ; in their demand for a higher righteousness of the heart 
 and life, instead of sacrifices of beasts ; in their lofty announcement of a 
 Divine future for his nation, if it prepared itself for it— the prophetic long- 
 ing and prophecy of his own spirit. That he never names Moses shows 
 that he must have passed beyond the Law to the Prophets. Isaiah, 
 especially, had excited in him a faith so deep and intelligent that Jesus 
 rebuked his fears, when perplexed and doubting, by a quotation from that 
 prophet's Messianic predictions. The few fragments left of his preaching 
 abound in figures borrowed from this, his favourite book — the viper bi'ood, 
 the trees of God's vineyard, the felling that which was barren, the con- 
 suming fire, the threshing floor, the winnowing shovel, and the giving 
 bread and clothing to the poor. 
 
 John's life in the wilderness seems to have been no short retirement, 
 His whole later bearing, his mode of life, his sad passionate earnestness. 
 and even his lofty resolve to come forth as a prophet, imply a long abode 
 in the solemn freedom of the desert, far from the distracting and enfeebling 
 tumult of life. But, though in the same wilderness, he was iioEssene^ 
 His relation to the people at large, his conception of a kingdom 'of Gx)d in 
 their midst, his later preaching to them, his sympathy even for publicans 
 
 u
 
 242 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 and sinners— from whom the Essenes and Pharisees shrank as poUution — 
 even his food, which, though simple, was still, in part, of flesh, show that 
 he was in no way connected with that order. Like its members, he was 
 unmarried; like them, he denied himself all indulgence, and showed a 
 prophet-like grandeur in his standard of aim and practice. But though 
 their settlements were close at hand, and were open to him, he chose to 
 live free and alone. It was well he did so, for this freedom created an 
 impulse before which the nation trembled and lived, while Essenism, with 
 no vital power beyond itself, left it to lie dead. 
 
 The fundamental principle in John's seclusion was, in fact, exactly the 
 reverse of that of the recluses of his day. They dwelt apart from men, to 
 seek their own spiritual good with a pious and cynical selfishness. John 
 sought the wilderness by an impulse which seemed like the voice of God, 
 to seek, in its loneliness, a nobler spiritual life than seemed possible amidst 
 the religious decay of the time. As a Jew, he had not risen above the 
 external and material in religion. An earnest, strong, all-embracing 
 heroism of self-denial, which proved its depth by its self -inflictions ; a 
 rejection of all temptations of society and culture, with their threatening 
 possibilities of defilement ; a strenuous war against nature, in every 
 appetite, to the extent of enduring the privations of hunger, homelessness, 
 and exposure ; were, at once, the discipline by which he struggled against 
 the " uncleanness " he still lamented, and the aids by which he hoped to 
 attain nearness to God. Yet he was far from caring only for himself. 
 His future career, and his very clothing, which was that of an ancient 
 prophet, showed that he carried the burden of his people on his soul, and 
 had fled from the crowd to entreat God for them, by prayer and penitence, 
 and, in accordance with the ideas of his time, to preiJare, on behalf of all, 
 by holy fasts, for gracious revelations from heaven. 
 
 This revelation he, in fact, received. He already saw that the times 
 were ripe for the judgments of God. The slavery to heathen Eome had 
 followed the agony of the days of Herod, and had dispelled every hope. 
 For nearly a generation he had seen nothing but misery in the land. In 
 his boyhood, the census of Quirinius had drenched the country in blood, 
 and had been followed by such oppression as had, already in his early 
 manhood, exhausted the resources of the nation, and caused a despairing 
 appeal to Eome for relief. Eapacious and unjust governors, true Eoman 
 knights, seeking only their own fortune, and rioting in the abuse of their 
 power, had added burdens for their own advantage; the officials and 
 soldiers had only too faithfully copied their lawless violence; heathen gar- 
 risons occupied the Holy City and the Temple ; the high priesthood had 
 become a mere sport of those in power, and all the sanctities of the national 
 life had been mocked and outraged in turn. Since the year 26, Pontius 
 Pilate had been governor, a man to be compared only to Gessius Florus, 
 the last Eoman Procurator, whose enormities in the end roused the war 
 of despair in which Jerusalem perished. Pilate Avilfully set himself to 
 insult and violate the sacred customs. It was beneath him to study the 
 people he ruled. ISTot merely harsh and hot-headed— carrying matters 
 haughtily even towards Antipas and the sons of Herod— he was male-
 
 THE VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS. 243 
 
 volent, aud ever on the watch to gratify by cunning and venomous threats, 
 the hatred rankling in his breast against a race he did not understand, 
 and who defied him. The people of Jerusalem suffered at his hands a 
 series of provocations without end, of malicious injuries, brawls, and 
 massacres. So envenomed was he, indeed, that even when he saw his 
 mistake and trembled before Tiberius, he would not j'ield, because he could 
 not consent to do his subjects a pleasure. Philo, his contemporary, 
 charges him with accepting bribes, with acts of wanton violence, with 
 robberies, with shameful treatment of many, wanton insults and threats, 
 continual executions contrary to law, and aimless aud grievous cruelties. 
 " He was a malicious and furious man," says Philo, " unwilling to do any- 
 thing that he thought would please his subjects." The nation looked back 
 even on Herod's daj's with regret, so much worse had become its state, 
 now that it was trodden under foot by the Romans, and saw no hope of 
 relief. John had noted all this. Living close to Jerusalem, he had been 
 amidst it all; imlike Jesus, who had lived far off in Galilee. He had 
 shuddered at the siDcctacle of infidel high priests — mere Sadducees, cul- 
 minating now in Caiaphas, whom the people hated, but Pilate liked, or, at 
 least, endured. He had learned to despise the bulk of the Eabbis, who 
 tamely bowed to the shameful yoke they had invoked, and submitted to it 
 from interest. Nor were the people better than their leaders. They lived 
 in the day dreams of a merely outward piety, with proud and mercenary 
 hopes of a rich earthly reward for it from the Messiah. 
 
 Amidst such mingled crime, wickedness, and corruption, the soul of 
 John was filled with humiliation and grief. The Holy Law, given at 
 Sinai, had sunk to a superstitious creed, and was only tolerated by Rome ; 
 the sceptre of the nation was broken in pieces, though it had been promised 
 that it would be everlasting ; the Holy Hill had become the citadel of an 
 uncircumcised soldiery, and the streets, which had echoed to the min- 
 strelsy of David and his sacred choir, were invaded by the ensigns and 
 music of a Gentile nation. It seemed as if God must presently appear. 
 He had never before remained for centuries without baring His Mighty 
 Ai"m ; He had never before endured, thus, the derision of the heathen, or 
 the sin of His people ; He had never before left them to jierish as now. 
 For His own name sake He would assuredly come. The prophecies of 
 Daniel had predicted only a short triumph to the iron kingdom, Rome, 
 and it had now lasted for a generation. But even in these last days, had 
 not the curse on the house of the Idumean, — the destruction of Antipater, 
 Phasael, Herod, Archelaus, and many others of the hated race, — shown 
 that the wrath of God was kindled, and that His avenging judgments 
 were on the way ? The indignation of God, foretold by the prophets, muiit 
 speedily fall, alike on apostate Israel, and on her enemies, 
 
 "What John had foreboded in Hebron or Jerusalem, became a certainty 
 to him in the wilderness. The lonely vastness raised him above anxious 
 contrasts of the weakness of Israel and the might of Rome, which might 
 have paralyzed resolution, and bidden hope despair. The solemn stillness 
 of the hills, and the boundless sweep of the daily and nightly heavens, 
 effaced the thought of man, and filled his soul with the majesty of God,
 
 244 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 What was man, whose days were a hand-bread fch, and whose foundation 
 Avas in tlie dust, before the Mighty Maker of Heaven and Earth — the Rock 
 of lyrael ? He had often appeared to dcHvcr His people when their case 
 seemed hopeless. And did not the chastisements of God, in the prophets, 
 always come laden Avith hidden good ? Were not cursing and blessing, 
 smiting and healing, death and resurrection, always joined in His visita- 
 tions ? John's own history in the wilderness gave him hope for his race. 
 His jDrayers, his penitence, his renunciation of the Avorld, his life devoted 
 to God, had removed the burden and agony of his soul, and he had found 
 peace, and rest, and grace, and heavenly light. What he had felt, was 
 possible for all Israel. If they could only be brought to resolve, to turn, 
 to repent, to live a new life, their repentance Avould bring down showers 
 of blessings, as it had always done in the past, and the lightnings and 
 thunders of judgment would break in wrath on their foes, but in heavenly 
 help to themselves. The repentance of Isi'ael would bring the Messiah. 
 He knew He was near. It had been revealed even before his birth that lie 
 himself was to go before Him, in the spirit and power of Elias, to make 
 ready a people prepared for the Lord. The call of God rang in his soul 
 like a trumpet, to go forth and preach to the people the coming of the ex- 
 pected Deliverer, in wrath to the impenitent, and grace to the contrite. 
 Led by the Divine spirit, through long years of spiritual struggle— his 
 soul turned inward on itself and upward to God — Ids body subdued by 
 long exposure and jirivation, and his Avhole being raised to a lofty invin- 
 cibility of purpose, untamed by customs, unweakened by comj^liances, but 
 filled Avith meditation and high religious life — he had, at length, felt equal 
 to taking the sublimest and most terrible position into which a frail man 
 could be raised by the Almighty, that of the herald predicted by his 
 favourite Isaiah, to pioneer the Avay for the Messiah of God. He AA'as to 
 fill up the valleys, and make low the mountains and hills, to make the 
 crooked places straight and the rough places even ; that is, to rebuke the 
 lofty and proud ; to raise up the humble and oppressed ; to spare none of 
 the crooked i^olicies and Avays of men, and to smooth down their roughness 
 by a hearty repentance, so as to fit them for tlie peaceful entrance of the 
 Christ. 
 
 The kingdom of God, as thus realized by John, was far higher and 
 grander than previous conceptions. In his infancy, Judas the son of 
 Saripheus, and Mattathias, had sought to bring in the reign of the Messiah 
 by a political rising, Avhich had been quenched in blood. In his boyhood, 
 Judas the Galilasan, had, in the same Avay, appealed to force, for the same 
 end, but had only covered the land Avith mourning. Yet the party was 
 daily increasing Avith whom a religious war Avith Rome had become a 
 fanatical creed. Even in Samaria it was proclaimed that the kingdom of 
 God was about to<!ome, and that it would take an outward political form. 
 The misery that had roused Judea had also pressed heavily on the Samari- 
 tans, and their national jealousy of the Jews anticipated a share in the ex- 
 pected Messianic glory. In their opinion, they, and not the Jews, held 
 the real Holy Land promised to Abraliam — the land Avhere the patriarchs 
 had fed their flocks ; they had the true Temple Mount, and the true LaAV,
 
 THE VOICE IN THE WILDEENESS. 245 
 
 free from the corruj^tions of the prophets ; upon their holy mountaui Moses 
 had buried the true vessels of the Tabernacle, which the Jews claimed to 
 have possessed under the Temple of Solomon, and Avhich, they asserted, 
 had been miraciilously hidden, after the Temple had been destroyed by 
 the Chaldeans. The possession of these vessels was all important, for, 
 with the fondness for outward embodiments of belief common to the East, 
 it was held that the place where they were hidden would be the scene of 
 the proclamation of the Messiah. A cherished promise, they avowed, 
 announced that when the kingdom of the Messiah was set up, the Ark, 
 and these sacred vessels, would be again brought forth. Jeremiah, so ran 
 the Jewish tradition, being warned of God, commanded the Tabernacle 
 and the Ark to go with him to Mount ISTebo, and there he hid them and 
 the altar of incense in a hollow cave, and stopped the door, which none 
 who went with him could afterwards find. Jeremiah thereon told them 
 that it would be " unknown till the time when God gathers His people 
 again together, and receives them to mercy. Then shall the Lord show 
 them these things again, and the glory of the Lord shall appear, and the 
 cloud also, as it was shown unto Moses." A fuller version of this tradition 
 introduced an angel as the chief actor, instead of Jeremiah. Shortly 
 befoi-e the destruction of Jerusalem, it went on, this heavenly being 
 descended to Jerusalem, alighting on the Temple, to save it. Having 
 prepared the Tabernacle, the Ephod of the High Priest, the Ark, the 
 Two Tables of stone from Sinai, the golden robes of the High Priest, 
 the Altar of Incense, the Urim and Thummim, and the holy vessels, for 
 removal, he carried them to a secret place, and cried with a loud voice, 
 " earth, earth, earth ! hear the word of the mighty Lord, and receive 
 what I commit to thee, and keep it to the end of the times, to restore it 
 agahi when thou art commanded, that the stranger get not possession of 
 these things. For the time will come when Jerusalem shall arise again, 
 to endure for ever ! " Then the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed 
 up all. A third version, used figuratively in the Apocaly|3se, supposes the 
 holy vessels to have been taken to heaven and hidden there. He who 
 overcomes is to eat of the manna which is hidden in heaven, and when 
 " the Temple of God was opened above, there was seen in it the Ark of the 
 Covenant." 
 
 The Samaritans, cherishing these fancies no less warmly than the Jews, 
 gave them a local colour, and had persuaded themselves that the true 
 place of the mysteriously hidden treasui-es was the top of Gerizim, beside 
 their own city— the hill from whose top the tril^es of Israel had sounded 
 the blessings of the Law, on the entrance of Joshua into Canaan. 
 
 How intensely such thoughts were fermenting in the minds of the 
 Samaritans in these years, was shown a little later, when John's mission 
 had closed without bringing them the results they had expected ; for what 
 then took place was only the final outburst of feelings long pent up. " A 
 man," says Josephus, " who made nothing of falsehood, and tickled the 
 multitude by whatever seemed likely to please them," had determined, if 
 ho could, to raise a popular movement, like that of John's, which had 
 swept over Judea and Galilee, with the hope, most probably, of being able
 
 246 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 to turn it to political nccoimt. Sending abroad a report through tho 
 valleys of Samaria, that a new prophet would reveal, on a fixed day, on 
 Mount Gerizim, the place where Moses had hidden the vessels of tho 
 Tabernacle, he raised an uncontrollable excitement. The announcement 
 implied that the kingdom of God would on that day appear, for the sacred 
 vessels were to remain hidden till it was to begin. It was a crafty 
 scheme, to transfer to Samaria the boastful hopes which had been the 
 glory of Judea, by making open claim to the possession of the mysterious 
 treasures, and of the Law in its purity. On the day appointed, thousands 
 gathered between Ebal and Gerizim. ISTew caravans continually brought 
 fresh numbers to Tirabatha, the village named by the prophet as the 
 rendezvous, till the matter became serious in its possible political results, 
 since the " ciders" of the people identified themselves with tho movement. 
 Pilate Avas alarmed, fearing that the multitude might he easily led from 
 a search for the sacred vessels to open sedition. His brutality had, in 
 fact, already prepared them for it. He therefore forbade the pilgrimage, 
 and placed posts of foot and horse at all the approaches to Gerizim, to 
 prevent any one ascending it. But the vast crowds, many of whom were 
 armed, would not be baulked, and tried to force their way to the sacred 
 spot. Pilate, on this, ordered the troops to disperse them ; fierce fighting 
 followed, in which many were killed, the rest taking to flight ; the principal 
 men among the j^risoners, taken during or after the battle, being put to 
 death. 
 
 This tragical incident took place a few years after John's appearance, 
 but it was of a piece with the popular feeling respecting the Messianic 
 kingdom which was mixed up with the politics of the day. John kept 
 entirely aloof from such views. If, as a Jew, he hoped that Israel would 
 hereafter be exalted under the Messiah, he left that for future disclosure, 
 and confined himself exclusively to the moral and spiritual. He was no 
 political agitator, no revolutionary, like Judas the Galila3an: his Messianic 
 kingdom, like that of Jesus, was, at least for the time, a kingdom not of 
 this world. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXV. 
 
 THE NEW PEOPHET IN THE WILDERNESS. 
 
 XN the fifteenth year of Tiberius, which fell between August, a.d. 28, and 
 -^ August, A.D. 29, the Roman empire lay under the shadow of the 
 darkest years of the tyrant, now an old man of seventy-one. Among those 
 alive at the time, and remembered since, for good or evil, the elder Pliny 
 — afterwards, when a Eoman admiral, killed at the first eruption, in 
 historical times, of Mount Vesuvius —was a child of four ; Vespasian, 
 hereafter, with his son Titus, to crush Jerusalem, was full of the ambitions 
 and dreams of a youth of 19 ; Caligula, one day to horrify the world by 
 the spectacle of an insane despot at the head of the empire, was a lad of 
 16 ; Claudius, hereafter to be emperor, was a poor, lame, trembling man of 
 38, and among the marriages of the year was that of the daughter of the
 
 THE NEW PROPHET IN THE WILDERNESS. 247 
 
 ill-fated Gei'manicus, from -which, nine years later, was born Nero. 
 Things were very peaceful throughout the empire, for the only wars at the 
 moment were with the Thracians, on the east of Europe, and with the 
 Fi'isians, in the Dutch swamps on the north-west. Pontius Pilate had 
 been two years procurator of Samaria, Judea, and Idumea, Herod Antipas 
 had reigned for about thirty-two years over Galilee and Samaria, and was 
 n Dw a man of about 50, and Philip his brother, about the same age, and of 
 the eame standing as a ruler, was still tetrach of the rest of the land be- 
 yond the Jordan ; living a quiet life, usefully and worthily. 
 
 Excepting the religious rising of Judas, and the other confusions after t 
 Herod's death, and at the time of the census by Quirinius, Palestine had \ 
 enjoyed nominal peace for nearly sixty years. ISTew cities and towns, with 
 all the elegances and splendour of Roman civilization, had risen over the 
 land — Cgesarea, with its docks, piers, warehouses, and broad streets, on 
 which a splendid temple to Aiigustus, seen far off at sea, looked, down. 
 In Jerusalem, the Tem^jle, four huge castles, the theatre, the circus, and 
 Herod's new palace, had been built. Sama^ria had been restored with 
 great splendour, and re-named Sebaste, the Greek equivalent of Augusta, 
 after the Emperor. The old Kajohar Saba, on the inner edge of the sea 
 l^lain, behind Joppa, had been rebuilt, and re-named Antipatris, after 
 Herod's father. Near Jericho, two tov\'ns — Kypros, named after Herod's 
 mother, and Phasaelis, after his brother,— had been founded. Anthedon, 
 close to Gaza, on the sea coast, had been raised from its ruins, and called 
 Agrippeion, after Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus. Two great fort- 
 resses had risen, called Herodion, after Herod, — one in the hills on the 
 south border, the other, three hours from Jerusalem, at the head of the 
 descent to the Jordan valley, where Herod had once had a sore struggle 
 with the rebellioTis Jews who pursued him. The passion of Augustus for 
 obliterating the traces of the great civil wars throughout the empire, had 
 everywhere been flattered by creations which at once beautified tho land, 
 and defiled it by their heathen accessories. In the far north, Philip, after 
 his father's death, had restored Paneas, in the green lap of Mount Hermon, 
 and called it Csesarea Philijjpi, in flattery of the emperor, and on the 
 north-east of the Sea of Galilee, he had embellished the old Bethsaida, and 
 re-named it Julias, after the daughter of Augustus. In Galilee, Herod 
 Antipas had rebuilt Sepjihoris, and surrounded its hill with strong walls ; 
 in the sheltered green plain opposite Jericho— the " Valley of the Acacias," 
 of the days of Joshua — he had built a fine town known as Livias, in com- 
 pliment to the unworthy wife of Augustus, and within the last ten years 
 he had founded the splendid new caj)ital on the shores of the Lake of 
 Galilee, and called it Tiberias, after the new emperor. Even the gross 
 and sensual Archelaus had copied to some extent his father's example, for 
 a new town had risen on the west side of the Jordan, amidst palm groves 
 elaborately irrigated, and named after himself, Archelais. 
 
 The " Eoman peace " which was destined to prepare the way for ; 
 Christianity, by breaking down the barriers between nations, and fusing 
 the civilized world, for the time, into one mighty commonwealth, had thus [ 
 boi'ne fruits on all sides, though misgovernnient was silently undermining
 
 248 THE LIFE OF CHIIIST. 
 
 the Avliole imperial system. The East was in profound peace. The 
 Parthian cavahy hosts, who were the terror of the age, had not watered 
 their horses in the Euphrates, or dared to cross it, for two generations. 
 But they still swarmed over the plains of Parthia, and only waited the 
 orders of the court of Ctesiphon, to dash in on the exposed territory of 
 Palestine. Four legions, held in reserve in Syria, and a strong line of 
 military posts along the Euphrates,— at the thought of being ordered to 
 which the Eoman military youth shuddered, as a banishment from the 
 world, — barely sufficed to hold these fierce Cossacks of the age in check. 
 The terror they had inspired in their last invasion was still unabated, for 
 even St. John, forty years later, in the Apocalypse, saw four destroying 
 angels bound in the great river Euphrates, who were loosed to slay the 
 third part of men. Two hundred thousand horsemen, in fiery blue and 
 brimstone-coloured mail, rode forth through the dried up river-bed, an 
 army of hell, to destroy mankind — symbols taken, unquestionably, from 
 the remembrance of the Parthians. The Roman historians use language 
 hardly less striking of the endless rushing swarms of wild cavalry — their 
 terrible shouts, like the bellowing of beasts, and the hideous clamour of 
 countless drums, like the noise of thunder ; their breastplates and helmets 
 of steel glittering like lightning, their horses covered with brass and steel 
 trappings, the faces of the soldiers painted, and their shaggy hair gathered 
 in a mass iipon their foi'eheads, after the Scythian fashion. Their dreadful 
 lances, their feigned retreats, their resistless arrows, the clouds of dust 
 they raised by their charges, hiding the battle-field, — their spears, their 
 slings, their blazing banners, gleaming with gold and silver, are all re- 
 counted. John and Jesus, doubtless, had both often heard from the men 
 of the generation before them, how these awful enemies had wasted the 
 land once and again, swarming on their lean and untiring steppe horses 
 through every valley, murdering, violating, burning, and plundering, for 
 their squadrons of " Immortals " and " Freemen," especially, remained the 
 terror of after years, as the smybol of treachery, greed, and ruthless 
 brutality. 
 I". It Avas in such a state of things that John at last came forth from his 
 retreat, as a prophet to his nation. The nearness of the wilderness of 
 Judea to Jerusalem, and the dense population on every side of it, had no 
 doubt led many to visit him from time to time ; for the report of a hermit 
 of special sanctity, living in any particular district, invariably attracted 
 many to see him and receive his counsels. He made his first public appear- 
 ance on the Lower Jordan. 
 
 Two hours east of the wretched village which is the Jericho of the pre- 
 sent, but three hours from the site of the city of John's day, and eight or 
 nine hours from- Jerusalem, the Jordan flows with a quick current towards 
 the Dead Sea, which is in sight, close at liand. Rising in the spurs of 
 Lebanon, and gathering tributary springs and brooks at OjBsarca Phih'ppi, 
 — from which Christ set out on His last journey to Jerusalem — flowing, ere 
 long, through the pear-shaped, marshy Sea of Merom, and then through 
 the lovely Lake of Galilee, the course of the stream, from its leaving the 
 lake to its passing Jericho, is only sixty English miles in a direct line, but 
 
 I
 
 THE NEW PROPHET IN THE WILDERNESS. 249 
 
 two hundred if we follow its countless twistings and turnings. Near 
 Jericho it has a breadth of from ninety to a hundred feet, and a varying 
 depth of from three to seven, and hence can be forded easily, except during 
 the time of floods in spring, autumn, and winter, when to attempt to cross is 
 very dangerous. It was at this part of the Jordan that Vespasian's soldiers, 
 in the last war, drove such multitudes of the Jews into the stream, when 
 swollen by spring floods, that " the river could not be passed over on ac- 
 count of the dead bodies that were in it " (which might defile one), " and 
 the Lake Asphaltitis" (the Dead Sea) "was also full of corpses, carried down 
 into it by the river." The waters flowing on towards the Dead Sea, be- 
 tween double banks, marking their lower and higher levels, in November 
 and April — here muddy, and elsewhere steep — covered with dense vegeta- 
 tion, or with waving forests of reeds : the rounded hills of Judea on the 
 west, giving way to the lofty peaks of Ammon on the east, — made a scene 
 well suited for his ministrations. Dense thickets of red tamarisks, stately 
 sycamores, with their white stems and broad leaves, oaks with their dark, 
 massy shadow, bending acacias, pale green willows and many-coloured 
 oleanders, still cover the upper terrace, varied by long, swampy tracts of 
 reeds, taller than a tall man, on the lower levels — while over the former, 
 in John's day, rose graceful clumps of palms, "the pride of Jordan," in 
 which lions found covert in the time of the prophets. The valley 
 is about three-quarters of a mile broad, and is barren wherever it rises 
 beyond the reach of the spring floods. Above it, a plain of nine or twelve 
 miles breadth, and from fifty to sixty feet higher than the ground beneath, 
 stretches, on the west side, to the foot of the rugged, bare, Jewish hills, 
 which rise to the height of a thousand or twelve hundred feet, and, on the 
 east, to the hills of Perea, two thousand to five thousand feet high. This 
 plain, the barren background to a fringe of verdure, is the once famous 
 " circle of the Jordan," where Sodom and other towns flourished, till 
 volcanic forces, as instruments of the wrath of God, destroyed them. It 
 is now known by the name of El Ghor, and is a vast, sandy, barren expanse, 
 hot as a furnace, and very unhealthy in summer, from the depth of the Jordan 
 gorge beneath the sea-level. Hence, in the time of John, it formed a strong 
 contrast to the green paradise on the western bank,^" the divine land," 
 immediately around Jericho, the city of palms and roses, — as it still does 
 to the rich fringe of vegetation skirting the waters, on the eastern side of 
 the river, but vanishing like a dream at only a few paces from them. 
 
 It was in this region, beside the flowing stream, with the wild, stony 
 hills shutting in the view on both sides ; in a landscape where the narrow 
 1 units of the yearly floods drew a sharp line between tropical luxuriance 
 and the scorched and desert barrenness beyond, that John — of whom Jesus 
 could say, in allusion to the waving cane beds on the river's edge, that he 
 was no reed shaken in the wind, but in very truth, Elias who was to come, 
 a prophet, and much more than a prophet — lifted up his voice as the mes- 
 senger before the face of God's Anointed, to prepare His way. The 
 appearance of John was itself sufficient to arrest attention. His spare 
 form, attenuated by meagre food and austerity : his bright Jewish eyes, 
 full of the living energy that burned within : his long hair, uncut for thirty
 
 250 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 ycar.s, the mark of JSTazarifce consecration : liis rongli haircloth garment, 
 and his coarse leathern girdle, made him the ideal of one of the ancient 
 prophets. The Scriptures described the greatest of the prophets— Elijah 
 the Tishbite, whom all expected to reappear before the Messiah— in ex- 
 actly such a guise as John presented— "a long-haired man, wearing a 
 leathern girdle ; " and they knew from the lessons in the synagogue, if 
 they had not read it for themselves, that the rough haircloth mantle had 
 been the common dress of the old prophets as a class. It was also, even 
 then, that of grief and contrition; adding to its associations with the 
 sacred past an appeal to their own sense of guilt and need of repentance. 
 
 The idea of the wilderness was sacred to the Jews. " From it," say the 
 Eabbis, " came the Law, the Tabernacle, the Sanhedrim, the priesthood, 
 and the office of the Levites. Even the kingship, and, indeed, every good 
 gift which God granted Israel, came from the desert." The invitation of 
 the people to it was in itself significant, for it recalled the words of Isaiah 
 — " Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway 
 for our God." In connection with the expectation of the Messiah, its 
 influence was immense. It was by relying on its weight with the people, 
 that Theudas, a wild visionary, who assumed the part of a prophet some 
 years after the Crucifixion, persuaded the multitudes to follow him, as a 
 second Moses, over the Jordan, to the wilderness, where he promised to 
 perform miracles, and assured them that God would appear to deliver 
 His people. Josephus speaks also of others who induced the people to go 
 out with them into the desert, " where, through the help of God, they 
 would work open signs and wonders," and Jesus Himself thought it 
 necessary, before leaving His disciples, to warn them that " Avhen it was 
 said the Christ was in the wilderness, they were not to go out thither." 
 The nation was daily expecting the appearance of " the wise and perfect 
 prophet," who should bring back the lost Urim and Thummim, "restore 
 the trilaes of Israel, turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, reprove 
 the times, and appease the wrath of God, before it broke out in fury." 
 Since Ezra's days the feeling had grown even deeper, that repentance 
 alone could save Israel. " If we repented but one day," said the Eabbis, 
 " the Messiah would appear." He was to lead all meu back to God by re- 
 pentance. " As long as Israel does not repent, it cannot expect the 
 Saviour," said Rabbi Juda. But this repentance would not happen till 
 Elijah had come, in fulfilment of the prediction of Malachi, and he was not 
 to do so till three days before the appearance of the Messiah, when his 
 voice would proclaim from one end of the earth to the other — " Salvation 
 Cometh into the world." 
 
 A proiihet, in the Jewish point of view, was less a seer than a fearless 
 preacher, from whom, to use the words of Clement of Alexandria, the 
 truth shone forth, as the light streams from the sun. He might reveal 
 the future, but his great characteristic was, that he was the mouthpiece of 
 God, to utter, by resistless impulse, the rebukes or commands of the Al- 
 ™g^ity, as His ambassador, and the interpreter of His will to men. John 
 realized this ideal. He startled the people by demanding repentance, if 
 they would escape the close approaching wrath of God. The Kingdom of
 
 THE NEW TROPHET IN THE WILDERNESS. 251 
 
 Heaven — a plii^ase familiar to them from the language of Daniel, of the 
 Psalms o£ Solomon, and of other books then in wide circulation — was at 
 hand, and would bring with it the terrors of heaven. The conscience of 
 the masses was roused. It had sunk to sleep under Pharisaic formalism. 
 Eoman oppression, and Sadducean indifference. John's voice sounded 
 like a trumpet to alarm them. The popular excitement spread. Though 
 he kept aloof from Jerusalem and the thickly peopled districts, the note 
 he had struck vibrated through the whole land. Crowds gathered in daily 
 gi'eater numljers from Jerusalem, Judea, and the wide uplands of Perca. 
 It seemed, indeed, as if he were the promised Elias, the herald of the 
 Messiah. Intensely real, he spoke nothing of Levitical rites or sacrifices, 
 or of the Eabbis, but demanded that the Law should be applied to the 
 conscience, and carried out in the life. A spiritual preparation would 
 alone avert the coming wrath. A second Elijah, in spirit as well as out- 
 ward appearance, and, like him, witnessing in evil times, he came to throw 
 down, not to build ; to startle, not to instruct ; to use the axe, not the 
 trowel. The approach of the judgments of vvdiich the last of the prophets 
 had spoken, — when the indignation of God would burn as an oven, and the 
 proud and the T.^icked should be as stubble, and be burned up till there 
 was left neither root nor branch, — was his great theme. He added, how- 
 ever, the comforting assurance of the prophet, that to those who feared the 
 name of the Lord of Hosts, the Sun of Righteousness should rise, with 
 healing in His wing-like beams. The whole strain of Malachi was, indeed, 
 only an anticipation of John's preaching. " The Lord, whom ye seek, even 
 the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in, shall come, saith the 
 Lord of Hosts. But who may abide the day of His coming ? And who 
 shall stand when He appeareth ? For He is like a refiner's fire, and like 
 fuller's soap. And He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver ; and He 
 shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver ; and He 
 will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and the adulterers, and the 
 false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, 
 the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his 
 right, and fear not Me, saith the Lord of Hosts." Like all the prophets, 
 his message was one of wrath, and yet, like theirs, it had a conditional 
 promise of Divine love and pity. As befitted his office, he seemed ordained, 
 like Elijah, to reprove his times, for like him, " he was unmoved before 
 the face of man, neither could any bring him into subjection." 
 
 With the call to repent, John united a significant rite for all who were 
 willing to admit their sins, and promise amendment of life. It was the 
 new and striking requirement of baptism, which John had been sent by 
 Divine appointment to introduce. The Mosaic ritual had indeed required 
 washings, and purifications, but they were mostly personal acts for cleanse 
 ing from ceremonial defilements, and were repeated as often as new un- 
 cleanncss demanded. But ba]otism was performed only once, and those 
 who sought it had to receive it from the hands of John. The old rites and 
 requirements of the Pharisees would not content him. A new symbol was 
 needed, striking enough to express the vastness of the change he demanded, 
 and to form its fit beginning, and yet simple enough to be easily aj:)plied
 
 252 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 to the wliole people ; for all, alike, needed to break with the past, and to 
 enter on the life of spiritual effort he proclaimed. Washing had, in all 
 ages, been used as a religious symbol, and an impressive form. Naaman's 
 leprosy had been cleansed away in the waters of the Jordan. The priests 
 in the Temple practised constant ablutions, and others were required daily 
 from the people at large, to remove ceremonial impurity. David had 
 prayed, " Wash me from mine iniquity." Isaiah had cried, " Wash ye, 
 make you clean, put away the evil of your doings." Ezekiel had told his 
 countrymen, to "wash their hearts from wickedness." Ablution in the 
 East, is indeed, of itself, almost a religious duty. The dust and heat 
 weigh upon the spirits and heart like a load ; its removal is refreshment 
 and happiness. It was, hence, impossible to see a convert go down into a 
 stream, travel-worn and soiled with dust, and, after disappearing for a 
 moment, emerge pure and fresh, without feeling that the symbol suited 
 and interpreted a strong craving of the human heart. It was no formal 
 rite with John. " He was a good man," says Josephus, " and urged the 
 Jews who were willing to live worthily, and to show uprightness one to 
 another, and piety towards Grod, to be baptized. For baj^tism was ap- 
 proved of by him, not as a means of obtaining pardon for some sins only, 
 but for the purity of the whole body, when the soul had been cleansed 
 beforehand by rigliteousness." On baptism, in itself, he set no mysterious 
 sacramental value. It was only water, a mere emblem of the purification 
 reqiiired in the life and heart, and needed an after baptism by the Holy 
 Spirit. No one could receive it till he had proved his sincerity, by a 
 humble public confession of his sins. Baptism then became a moral vow, 
 to show, by a better life, that the change of heart was genuine. 
 
 Bathing in Jordan had been a sacred symbol, at least, since the days of 
 Naaman ; but immersion by one like John, with open and contrite sorrow 
 for sin, sacred vows of atnendraent, and hope of forgiveness, if these 
 proved lasting, and all this in preparation for the Messiah, was something 
 wholly new in Israel. It marked, in the most striking way, the wonderful 
 moral revolution which had taken place in the hearts of the people. If, as 
 a school of the Rabbis contend, it was even then the custom to baptize 
 proselytes on their forsaking heathenism, and seeking admission to the 
 communion of Israel, the attitude of John towards the nation was startling, 
 and their submission to the rite a still greater proof of his power over the 
 popular mind. In this case, it was no less than the treatment of Israel as 
 if it had become heathen, and needed to seek entrance again, on no higher 
 footing than a Gentile convert, to the privileges it had lost. 
 
 But he did not leave them to their own imaided efforts after purity. 
 Had he merely summoned them to " flee from the Avrath to come," he 
 would have driven them to despair. Had he invited them to baptism, and 
 then left them to their own efforts after holiness, he would have mocked 
 them by an impossible task ; for man, if he look no higher than himself, 
 can never become pure. Avowing this, he gave moaning and promise to 
 his command and invitation, by pointing them to the coming Messiah, the 
 Lamb of God, who should take away the sins of the world. 
 
 It must have been a strange scene, and it remained long in the popular
 
 THE NEW PEOPHET IN THE WILDERNESS. 253 
 
 memory. " AVliat went yo out into the wilderness to see ? A man clothed 
 in soft raiment ? " asked Jesus, in later months. The sudden apparition 
 of a " saint," whose life, for years, had been spent in " the house of thirst, 
 where demons and dragons howl," was fitted to startle the whole com- 
 munity, already excited to the uttermost. Men of all classes gathered to 
 listen to the new prophet. The movement, at first local, gradually spread 
 through "the whole nation." The nearer districts — Jerusalem, Judea, 
 and Perea — gathered first. Ere long, the excitable Galilceans, as far as 
 Lebanon and the East Jordan counti-y, caught the enthusiasm, and moved 
 towards the Jordan valley. Caravans, with their numerous beasts, must 
 have covered the Galila;an and Jewish roads, all wending to the one centre. 
 Men left their work or their calling ; the keen trader, the Roman tax- 
 collector, and the native and foreign soldier among them. Every rank 
 was represented. All that was noble, and all that was base in Israel ; the 
 holy and the worldly ; the pure and the corrupt ; the earnest and the 
 false ; the friends of Rome and its enemies, mingled in the throng. 
 Supercilious Rabbis, long-robed Pharisees, cold and courtly Sadducees, 
 priestly dignitaries, circumspect Levites, grey-haired elders of the people ; 
 the rich farmer with full barns, and the poor peasant ; soldiers of the 
 Tetrarch Antipas, from Perea ; perhaps, also, proselytes from the Roman 
 garrison at Jerusalem, more disposed to accept baptism in the Jordan 
 than circumcision; publicans — born Jews, but despised and hated, alike 
 for their calling and their unjust exactions —found themselves together. 
 Israelitish women, also, were not wanting, and among them, not a few 
 outcasts of the community — servants of vice. All sought part in the 
 salvation of Israel, or at least, wished to seem interested in it — even the 
 classes thrust back as unclean by the Pharisees and Essenes. Some 
 longed to lay hold of it, others came only to look, criticize, and gossiji, or 
 report to the authorities. 
 
 Everything was so new, so startling, so impressive — the wilderness, the 
 stream, the solemn hills, a prophet appearing, after more than five hundred 
 years. His right to reject and denounce the whole present, in the name of 
 God, was now, as always with prophets in the past, universally acknow- 
 ledged. His words, his baptismal symbol, the kingdom he preached, the 
 Messias whom he announced as at hand, the very multitudes assembled, 
 the visible emotion, the evident good effected, the contrition of the most 
 sunken classes — the publicans and harlots— all showed that the whole 
 nation believed in him. From the rite advanced with such prominence, he 
 was known as "the Baptist," but many gave him the name of Teacher^ 
 and even that' of Prophet. He did not claim to perform miracles, like 
 Elijah, but his word had a wonderful power — his very baptism seemed to 
 be " from heaven " — and, even after his imprisonment and death, the 
 people maintained, with passionate tenacity, against the petty carpings of 
 the priesthood, that he was, indeed, a prophet. 
 
 Many even questioned whether he wore not the Messiah, or at least, 
 "the prophet like Moses," whom they expected. He swayed the masses 
 by his words, at his will, and ruight have made any political use of them 
 he chose, had ho l)cen so minded.
 
 254 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 As the influence of the movement spread in ever-widening circles over 
 the nation, it became impossible for the self-sufficient authorities at Jeru- 
 salem to ignore it. The religious instruction of the peoiole was their pre- 
 rogative. They claimed to sit in the seat of Moses and to have the key of 
 knowledge, and it was against the rule for any one to teach who had not 
 their authority, confirmed by formal ordination. A deputation of priests 
 and Levites of the Pharisee party was, therefore, deputed to go to the 
 Jordan, and interrogate this new leader of the people as to his claims. 
 Was he the Christ P or was he Elias ? or was he the expected prophet ? 
 Without a momentary hesitation of vanity or ambition, from the })ossibility, 
 with his vast popular support, of 2"'hi'yiiig a great part, his manly truthful- 
 ness repudiated the right to any of these names. With the whole nation 
 under his influence, and regarded by them with the reverent awe which 
 such questions and suggestions hint, his lofty soul retained its grand 
 simplicity. " He was only the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make 
 straight the way of the Lord, as saith the prophet Esaias." 
 
 I^or is it wonderful that his mission had such amazing success. Men 
 honour a lofty and fearless soul, seeking no selfish object, but braving all 
 opposition for the noblest ends. John had nothing to lose but his life, 
 and had no ambition but for the faithful discharge of his high commission 
 from the Almighty. Hunger and thirst and nakedness had been his 
 familiar friends, and he who had faced the terrors of the deserts so long, 
 coiild have little to alarm him in any human anger. " What to him," asks 
 Edward Irving, " was a scowling Pharisee, or a mocking Sadducee, or a 
 fawning publican, or a rough soldier, or a riotous mob ? These were 
 jocund, cheerful sights, to one who had roamed amongst the wuld beasts 
 of the desert, and in the midst of them laid down his head under no 
 canopy, and with no defence but the canopy and defence of the providence 
 of the Most High. Around a man who can desjiise accommodations and 
 conveniences, and deal with nature in ancient simplicity and independence, 
 and move amongst her social and religious institutions like a traveller 
 from another world, free to judge, and censure, and approve, as havinfy 
 himself nothing at stake— around such a man there is a moral grandeur 
 and authority to which none but the narrowest and most bigoted minds 
 will refuse a certain awe and reverence. And when such a personao-e 
 assumes to himself Divine commission, and publishes new truth with 
 Divine authority, and rebukes all wickedness, and scorns all consequences, 
 he takes, by the natural right of the wiser, the bolder, and the better man, 
 a high place above those who feel themselves enslaved and enshackled by 
 customs which they despise." 
 
 Such was the mighty movement that filled all minds, and drew the 
 whole people, by turns, to the banks of the Jordan. Beside the livino- 
 waters, between the solemn hills on both sides, and under the cloudless 
 blue of an Eastern sky, stood the strange figure of the prophet before his 
 no less striking audience. Like all great leaders, he could read the 
 characters of those he addressed. The smooth varnished hypocrisy of the 
 Pharisee or Sadducee could not deceive him. Those who might have 
 come to him in the hope to gain the inviting promises of the new life by
 
 THE NEW PROPHET IN THE WILDERNESS. 255 
 
 an easy lip confession, and a momentary rite, soon found their error. 
 Like Lvxtlier, or Latimer, or Knox, lie forgot self in Ins grand fidelity. 
 Cold prudence or timid caution had no place in a soul so intensely iu 
 earnest. The tkuth, which he comes to proclaim, is higher than man, and 
 alone commands his homage. His sentences strike, swift and glittering, 
 like lightning flashes, amidst the roll of judgment-day thunders. Each 
 sentence is vivid with bold pictures drawn from nature and life. Ho 
 compares Israel to a barren fruit-tree ready for felling, and jDoints to the 
 axe already laid at its roots. Timely repentance, and the bringing forth 
 good fruit, may avert the stroke, otherwise it must presently fall, and the 
 tree be cast into the fire. The next moment Israel is a great threshing 
 floor, and the winnowing shovel is at hand to cleanse it thoroughly, that 
 the wheat may be gathered into the garner, and the chaff burned up with 
 unquenchable fire. With perfect humility he points all away from himself, 
 to the Mightier One at hand, for whom he w^as unworthy, in his own 
 esteem, to perform the slave boy's service of unloosing and removing his 
 sandals. He would baptize them with the Holy Ghost and with fire — 
 the Holy Ghost to kindle in them heavenly grace, if penitent ; fire, to con- 
 sume them, if the reverse. The terrors of the day of wrath rolled over his 
 hearers, as his foremost thought ; sounds of hope broke in, like soft music 
 only at intervals, to keep the contrite from despair. 
 
 The announcement of Divine judgments on a rebellious people was by 
 no means new in Israel, and of itself hardly explains the immense effect 
 of John's preaching. Its power lay in its depth and its demands. The 
 Kingdom of Heaven, which was at hand, was not a mere gift from above, 
 which they might passively receive, but a human work, which they must 
 themselves carry out. Merely to wait in idle expectancy, as in the past, 
 would not suffice. Nor would the idly-busy trifling of legal rites and 
 observances. They must no longer trust to their descent from Abraham, 
 nor to the cleansing of the outside of the jilatter by Pharisaic strictness. 
 The coming of the promised kingdom, to each hearer, meant his lifting his 
 own life to a higher plane, by steady resolve and effort. Eeligion must, 
 henceforth, be practical and earnest : in the heart and life, not iu worthless 
 outward forms or privileges. The great truth was now, once more, pressed 
 home to the conscience of men that the true kingdom of heaven is in the 
 renewed soul. It m-arked an era in the moral history of the world, and, 
 Christ Himself has recognised its momentous greatness. "Among them 
 that are born of women," said He, " there has not risen a greater than 
 John the Baptist. For all the prophets and the Law prophesied, until 
 John. Till then it was future and distant ; the object of eager expectation 
 only. But, from his days, the kingdom of heaven is gained by earnest 
 violence, and men who struggle earnestly take it for themselves." John 
 proclaimed to a generation that had forgotten it, the great ti'uth that " the 
 kingdom." was no mere extei-nal blessedness, but the reign of God in the 
 soul of man ; that we must strive, if we would enter into it, or, to use the 
 figure employed by Jesus, that— like a city to be taken by storm, — it was 
 to be won only by the utmost earnestness. Repentance, Avith John, was 
 no mere formal confession, but a change of mind ; it included not only
 
 25G THE LIFE OP ciimsT. 
 
 regret for the past, but a new life for the future ; and this he urged so 
 prominently, that even Josephus, a generation afterwards, makes it a char- 
 acteristic of his preaching. To the frank avowal of sins there was added 
 an annihilation of all self -righteousness, whether resting on Abrahamic 
 descent or attainments in Pharisaic holiness, and a pledge was demanded 
 of a higher spiritual life towards God and man, involving life-long effort. 
 
 His whole conception of preparation for the Messianic kingdom was 
 new in his age. The Samaritan prophet, who soon after summoned the 
 multitudes to Gerizim, relied on the wholly external act of securing the 
 vessels of the old Tabernacle, as an inauguration of the day of the Messiah. 
 The Galilasans were disposed to demand the kingdom from the Romans, 
 sword in hand, in the belief that Jehovah would not desert His people, iu 
 arms for His cause. John, on the contrary, sought to jirepare for it by a 
 moral regeneration of the community. The kingdom of God, with him, 
 was, like that of Isaiah, a kingdom of righteousness and holiness. He had 
 sat at the feet of the prophets, not of the Eabbis. He had sought the 
 knowledge of the preparation needed, not, like the Eabbis, from the Book 
 of Leviticus ; not, like the Zealots, from the warlike records of the Macca- 
 bees ; nor, like the Essenes, from mystic revelations ; but from Isaiah. 
 His whole preaching was only a variation of that of the great prophet, iu 
 the opening of his book — " Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil 
 of your doings from before Mine eyes ; cease to do evil, learn to do well : 
 seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the 
 widow." He says nothing of an earthly kingdom, or political glory. The 
 sins that had separated between them and God must be removed, and their 
 place filled with " fruits meet for reiDcntance," if the Divine kingdom was 
 to be establised among them. Pharisees and Essenes had sought to pro- 
 pitiate God by their legal rites. Neither knew of confession of sins, or 
 repentance. The Pharisee only boasted of his virtues, and the Essenes 
 praised righteousness, without a word about penitence. John trusted, not 
 to external forms, but to broken-hearted contrition. Man must work to- 
 gether with God to bring about the fulfilment of the prophecies of the 
 Messiah's reign. 
 
 Nor did he content himself with vague or general appeals or reproofs. 
 " Ye brood of vipers," cried he to a ci'owd of Pharisees and Sadducees, 
 who had come to his baptism, to scoff and criticise, rather than to confess 
 and repent, and who opposed him with the conservatism of lawyers and 
 the bigotry of priests, — "who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to 
 come ? " In the words of St. Luke, " they rejected the counsel of God 
 towards themselves, not having been baptized by John," and, so far from 
 accepting his mission, denounced him as having a devil. He brushed them 
 aside, with their endless quiddities and quillets, and casuistical cases, and 
 legal cobwebbery, and they hated him in return. They had come from 
 Jerusalem in full-blown official dignity, as a deputation from the ecclesi- 
 astical courts, to ask his credentials, and test his soundness. But whether 
 priests, or Levites, or Eabbis, they shrivelled before the indignant glance 
 and fiery words which exposed their insincerity and incompetence. John 
 held his authority, not from them, but from a higher court ! Instead of
 
 THE NEW PROPHET IN THE WILDERNESS. 257 
 
 flattering them, lie told tliem, as he had told the crowds they despised, 
 that they must bring forth fruits woi'thy of repentance. In their narrow 
 pedantic pride they felt sure of a part in the kingdom of the Messiah 
 simply as descendants of Abraham ; his righteousness being reckoned as 
 theirs. Israel, alone, could jolease or find favour with God, and it did so 
 on the footing of its descent. The " Kingdom of Heaven " was to be 
 strictly Jewish, all other nations being excluded, and " it was Jewish by 
 hereditary right." But John shattered this wretched immorality. " Begin ^ 
 not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham for father : for I say unto i 
 you, that God is able of these stones of the desert, lying countless around, \ 
 to raise up true children to Abraham, and will exclude you, his pretended 
 children, from the kingdom, unless you repent ! " The stern, fearless 
 words of the old ijroiihets, which made them to be hated by the multitude, 
 with the exception of Daniel, the prophet of pleasant things, fell once more 
 from the lips of John, with the same result, at least on the part of the 
 Babbis. They received homage from all others, but this man treated them 
 with withering scorn. They had fancied he would be like a reed moved 
 in the wind before them, but they had found him an oak. Flattery and 
 fear were as strange to his soul as his own rough mantle would have been 
 among the soft clothing of kings' palaces. 
 
 The contrast between John's teaching and that of the Eabbis, could 
 have had no more striking illustration than his recorded answers to various 
 inquirers, whom his stern language to their religious leaders had, ap- 
 parently, alarmed. If the Eabbis were in danger of the fire, what must 
 be required of common men.? But no harshness marked his words to 
 honest anxiety. He demanded simply that they show their sincerity by 
 their unselfishness. They were to act on their professions of desire to lead 
 a new life. " He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath 
 none ; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise." If they ministered to 
 the naked and hungry, as a loving duty, they proved their discipleship 
 genuine. John's wide human sympathies embraced all classes. Like 
 Jesus, he cast out none who came to him. The abhorred publicans, from 
 whom the Pharisees shrank as accursed, were cheered by the assurance 
 that they, too, might share in the kingdom, if their repentance were sincere. 
 "Exact no more," said the prophet, "than that which is appointed you." 
 Even the soldiers were welcome, and had a fitting counsel — " Do violence 
 to no man, neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your wages." 
 That the publican should do his duty honestly, as in the sight of God, and 
 that the soldier should deny himself the license of his calling, and be 
 faithful to his standard, from a sense of obligation before God, were 
 practical tests of loyalty to conscience, which would carry with them the 
 Divine favour. In all cases, moral regeneration was the grand aim, and 
 the man himself must work to carry out the reformation. 
 
 But, while John thus demanded practical results, by human effort, he 
 was far from teaching that the most earnest wish to change the life, would 
 of itself suffice. He brought the hope of forgiveness in the day of the 
 wrath of God to bear on all classes, and made them feel that salvation 
 could not come, after all, from their own acts, though these must be reu- 
 
 s
 
 258 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 dered, but only Ijy pardou from God. He proclaimed, besides, the need 
 of the Spirit of God to perfect the inner revolution. " He that cometh 
 after me Avill baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire," For the 
 hardened there would, indeed, be a baptism of fire, but, for the contrite, 
 the heavenly gift of a higher will, and a greater power, a deeper knowledge 
 of God, and a closer communion with Him. Feeling the want of the 
 times, and filled with the spirit of the prophets, he could not forget how 
 they had announced, as a sign of the coming of the Messiah, that Jehovah 
 '•' would pour out His spirit upon all flesh," "that He would pour water 
 upon him that was thirsty, and floods on the dry ground," and " His spirit 
 upon the offspring of Jacob." He could not doul:)t, therefore, that He, 
 before whom he was only a herald's voice, — the Mighty One, whose sandals 
 it was too great an honour for him to unloose, — would come, not only to 
 avenge, but to bless. But, to do this, He must bring with Him a higher, 
 quickening spiritual power—the power of the Holy Ghost. In the bestowal 
 of this heavenly influence, to carry out the new creation, begun by the 
 forgiveness of sins, was summed up John's message to his age. 
 
 It was a mark of the surprising greatness of John's whole spiritual 
 nature, that he had realized the need of action on the part of man, to 
 secure the fulfilment of the Divine promise of the kingdom ; but it was 
 no less so, that he realized the limitations of liuman effort, and jiroclaimed 
 the necessity of a Divine, new-creating power, to secure the holy transfor- 
 mation of the will and heart. To be real and earnest in such an age, to 
 unveil its true spiritual wants, to wake it to new religious life, were 
 transcendent merits, but it is even grander to see the mighty man — full of 
 humility, with deep self-knowledge, and insight into his fellow-men — jioint- 
 ing to God in heaven, who, stronger than human will or effort, alone could 
 break the chains of sin from the soul, and lead it to the light. 
 
 Wholly self-oblivious, tainted by no stain of human pride, self-conscious- 
 ness, or low ambition, John had felt it no usurpation, or sacrilegious 
 assumption, to constitute himself " the messenger," predicted by Malachi, 
 " sent to prepare the way before the Lord." ISTor was his preaching more 
 than an expansion of the prophet's words— that " the Lord, whom ye seek, 
 shall suddenly come to His Temple, even the messenger of the covenant, 
 whom ye delight in." He had received the commission from no human 
 lips, but had been sot apart to it, from above, Ijcfore his birth. Filled with 
 the grandeur of his mission, nothing arrested him, or turned him aside. 
 The crowds saw in him the most unbending strength, united with the 
 most complete self-sacrifice ; a type of grand fidelity to God and His truth, 
 and of the lowliest self-denial. The sorrows and hopes of Israel seemed 
 to shine out from his eyes — bright with the inspiration of his soul, but 
 sad with the greatness of his work— as he summoned the crowds to re- 
 pentance, alarmed them by words of terror, or led them, in groups, to the 
 Jordan, and immersed each singly in the waters, after earnest and full 
 confession of their sins. The newly baptized knelt in prayer along the 
 banks ; many, doubtless, with tears, loud sighs, and exclamations, as is 
 still the manner with the emotional races of the East, even when far less 
 excited than John's hearers must have been. All wished to begin a new
 
 THE NEW PROPHET IN THE WILDERNESS. 259 
 
 life, and craved counsel from one in -^-honi they now implicitly believed, 
 and each, in turn— publican, soldier, citizen, and open sinner— heard a few 
 words which pointed out to them their future safety. The narrow sepa- 
 ratism and worthless externalism of the Law were to be forsaken, and 
 love to God and their neighbour, with a future baptism of the Holy Ghost, 
 by Him who was to come, were to take their place. 
 
 But John, with all his grandeur, was still a Jew. Wliat his conceptions 
 of the kingdom of the Messiah were, beyond his realization of its purity, wo 
 have few grounds of judging. From an after incident in his life, it would 
 seem that he thought of it as the restoration of the theocracy, amidst a 
 people prepared for it by repentance and moral reformation. It would be 
 to set him above his times, and even above the Apostles, as they remained 
 during the whole lifetime of their Master, to conceive him as anticipating 
 the jnirely si:5iritiial kingdom Jesus was to establish. He was greater than 
 all tire prophets, in his magnificent faith that the work he had begun would 
 be carried out by Jehovah Himself, through His Messiah, and in his clear 
 sense of the need of human action, in repentance and a new life, to the 
 establishment of the Messiah's kingdom. Others had left God to do all 
 at some future time, limiting themselves to prophecy. John alone taught 
 that the kingdom of God had already come in the contrite soul which 
 proved its penitence by holy fruits. But he was also less than the least in 
 that kingdom, in his inadequate realization of it in its full greatness. He 
 "came neither eating nor drinking," — a type of Jewish asceticism — and his 
 teaching bore, throughout, the true Jewish stamp. Perhaps he rose above 
 the thought, universal in his day, that the outer act had, in itself, an in 
 trinsic worth, if not even a spiritual power, but the importance he attached 
 to outward expressions of penitence was entirely Jewish. Like the Rabbis, 
 he laid stress on fasting, and on the " making joraycrs," in the Jewish 
 sense, and his disciples, in those and other extei'nal exercises of religion, 
 found themselves nearer the disciples of the Pharisees than they were to 
 those of Jesus. As a Nazarite and an ascetic, the dread of defilement 
 must have kept him apart from the great mass of his audience, for he 
 dared not touch any but '"' the clean," even in baptizing them. 
 
 In this aspect of it, the work of John was, in the eyes of Christ, only the 
 sewing a new patch on an old garment, or putting new -wine into old 
 bottles. Tlie great movement he set on foot, while an immense advance on 
 the past in Judaism, was ^''ct, in its essence, Jewish. The ascetic spirit of 
 its origin perpetuated itself in John's disciples, and marked his whole 
 conceptions as imperfect and passing — the morning red heralding tho 
 day, but as yet mingled with the night. 
 
 John formed no separate communion. He taught his disciples to pray, 
 and it would seem as if he had ultimately gathered a special band round 
 him, as the Apostles were gathered round Jesus. But he did not come to 
 found a new sect. His far grander aim was to raise the nation from 
 sijiritual death, and direct it to the Messiah now at hand.
 
 260 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 THE BAPTISM OF JESrS AND THE DEATH OF JOHN. 
 
 THE great wave of religioiis excitement produced by tlie preaching of 
 John had set the whole land in motion. Eoulque de Xouilly, the 
 famous monkish preacher of the thirteenth century, whose discourses 
 moved all classes of society, from the highest to the lowest, so that people 
 rushed in crowds from distant countries to hear him, or Whitefield, in the 
 last century, who stirred the whole nation in his day, help us to realize the 
 sensation produced by John's ministrations. To a people sunk for the time 
 in religious apathy, and corrupted in morals, but loyal to the voice of their 
 Scriptures and the lofty spiritual ideals of the past, his voice came like a 
 trumjiet, rousing them to new life. His bronzed, wasted features, his 
 prophet's dress and bearing, his fearless boldness for God, and the response 
 of their own hearts to his denunciations and demands, made him a mighty 
 power. He gave utterance to their deepest desires and aspirations, fanned 
 their national hopes, and roused their enthusiasm. As a people, they were 
 not in favour of asceticism. The Rabbis had a saying, that the ignorant 
 did not know how to keep themselves from transgressions of the Law, nor 
 the common people how to become " the Pious," or rigorous Jews. Even 
 one so famous as Simeon the Just discountenanced ISTazarite vows, with 
 the rigid abstinence and self-denial they imposed. The worldly Sadducee 
 laughed at the austerities of the Rabbis, " who tormented themselves in 
 this life without gaining anything by it in the other," and the mass of the 
 people were no doubt of their mind. But the vision of a true Nazarite, in 
 whom all could see a grand superiority of the worthless ambitions of life, 
 was like a revelation of eternal realities, which no one could turn lightly 
 aside. The very power of his words seemed to prove the truth of his 
 warnings, for the Rabbis had already told them that " universal repent- 
 ance," such as they seemed to see round them, " would only happen when 
 Elias had come," and his coming was the sure sign of the approach of the 
 kingdom of God. 
 
 Everything was fitted to startle. The proclamation of the Messiah as 
 at hand — the call to repentance— the announcement of the swift rolling 
 towards them of the thunders of the wrath of God— the declared worthless- 
 ness of distinctions of race, blood, or position— the demand for fruits meet 
 for repentance, or, in other words, that a man must work out his own 
 salvation in co-operation with God— the sjTubolical rite to which he re- 
 quired submission, and the humbling confession of sin before the world, 
 which he added— all combined to carry his name and work to the utmost 
 limits of the land. 
 
 Meanwhile, the authorities at Jerusalem, with the jealousy of all eccle- 
 siastical bodies towards those outside their own pale, grew uneasy at his 
 success, and plotted to get him into their toils, as they did afterwards in 
 the case of our Lord. The ensnaring questions put to him by the deputa- 
 tion of priestly Pharisees sent from Jerusalem, seemed to have made John 
 thmk it necessary to seek safety by removing beyond the bounds of Judea-
 
 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS AND THE DEATH OF JOHN. 2G1 
 
 From the " circle of Jordan," including Ijoth sides of the stream, he passed 
 upwards, apparently, to the small sunken plain which borders it, just 
 beneath Scythopolis, where Gideon's Brook of Trembling makes its steep 
 way from the eastern end of Esdraelon, down the Wady Jalud, to the 
 Jordan. He chose a spot near this, on the eastern side, known in those 
 days as Bethabara, where a ford crossed the river, and gave facilities for 
 baptism. He had been preaching and baptizing for some time in the 
 south, and his removal to a more northern position opened a new field, 
 from its nearness to Galilee. The excitement still continued as gi-cat as 
 ever. The towns on the Lake of Galilee, and even the villages north of 
 Esdraelon, poured forth to the new prophet. Weeks passed, and it must 
 now have been the late summer, for, before long, John had to leave the 
 Jordan, as too shallow, at its accessible parts, for baptism, and go to 
 another place — Enon, near Salem — an unknown locality, where pools more 
 suitable were still to be had. But, as yet, there was no sign of the advent 
 of the expected ]\Ie3siah. The assembling of the nation, and the great 
 work on the banks of the Jordan, were necessary preliminaries, in the 
 Di\ ine counsels, to dignify the ultimate Advent of the Redeemer. 
 
 Jesus had been waiting the fit moment for leaving His thirty years' 
 obscurity in K'azareth, and presenting Himself before the herald who had 
 been unconsciously proclaiming Him. Though cousins, the Bajitist and 
 the Son of Mary had never seen each other, for they lived at oi:)posite ends 
 of the country, and John had spent we do not know how many years of his 
 life in hermit seclusion, far from man. But if he did not know His person, 
 he had yet, doubtless, heard the wondrous circumstances attending His 
 birth, and must have been daily expecting Him to put forth His claims. 
 At last, Jesus left ISTazareth and came to Jordan, and presented Himself 
 before him. His appearance, wholly different from that of all who had 
 thronged to his ministry, at once arrested the prophet's eye. The holy 
 devotion and heavenly repose which marked Him as He stood in prayer, 
 spoke of a purity and greatness before which the soul of John did instant 
 reverence. He might have stern words for the proud and self-righteous, 
 but, in the presence of such a vision as that before him, he has only those 
 of lowliest homage. The light, as of other worlds, shining from the depth 
 of those calm eyes ; the radiance of a soul free from all stain of sin, trans- 
 figuring the pale face — full, at once, of highest beauty, tenderest love, and 
 deepest sadness, was hereafter, even wdien dimly seen by the light of mid- 
 night torches and lanterns, to make accusers shrink backwards and fall, 
 overcome, to the gi-ound, and Simon Peter pray — " Depart from me, for I 
 am a shiful man, Lord ! " The soul has an instinctive recognition of 
 goodness, and feels its awfulness. Spiritual greatness wears a kingly 
 crown which compels instant reverence. Had Jesus been an earthly king, 
 John would have remained the stem, fearless prophet ; had He been the 
 highest of the earthly priesthood, he would have borne himself as a 
 superior, in the consciousness of his high mission. But the royalty before 
 him was not of this world, and the priesthood was higher than that of 
 Aaron. Jesus had come to be baptized, but John, for the first and last 
 time, with any one in all the crowds that had gathered round him, hesi-
 
 262 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 tated, and drew back. " I have need to be baptized of Tliee," said he, 
 " and comest Thou to me ? " He might not know by name, or open in- 
 timation, whom he had before him, but unerring instinct taught him that 
 he addressed a greater than himself. He was longing for the revelation 
 of the Messiah, and knew that God could manifest Him at any moment, 
 clothing Him whom He had designated for the high dignity, with Divine 
 might to carry out His work. It is, indeed, the especial greatness of the 
 Baptist that he not only rose to the level of so great an enterprise as the 
 spiritual regeneration of his country, and devoted himself to it with 
 gigantic energy, and that he was a man of spotless truth and dauntless 
 courage, but that, with all this, he was filled with a splendid enthusiasm, 
 and unfalterins: faith in the nearness of the Messiah. This alone could 
 have supported him under the burden of his work. ISTo one, till then, had 
 stood, like him, between the dead past and the dimly rising future, in 
 hopeful and confident expectation. He had led the people from the cor- 
 ruption, wickedness, and confusion of tlieir decayed religiousness, and 
 stood calmly and grandly at their head, in the firm belief that the Messiah, 
 who, only, could fulfil the promises he had made them, of Divine help to- 
 wards a higher life, would emerge from the darkness before him. In such 
 an attitude of intensest expectancy, he must at once have recognised the 
 marks of the possible Messiah in any one who showed them. He might 
 look for no outward signs : the Divine lineaments of a nature fit for such 
 an office would suffice, the future being left to God, to whom he entrusted 
 his own work. He would not go abroad to search for one who might be 
 what he desired, but his ardent, yet keen soul, could not fail to discover 
 Him if He came within his sphere. Hence, he felt, instinctively that in 
 Jesus the object of his longings seemed to have been found. " I knew 
 Him not," said he, some time later, " and had not in any measiire begun 
 my work because I knew Him, or that He might at my request come to 
 me ; but I have been baptizing and rousing Israel, that He, though un- 
 known to me, — drawn indeed by my work, but without design or thought 
 on my part, and, therefore, only by the clear leading and purpose of God, 
 — should be revealed to Israel as the true Messiah." He had, already, be- 
 fore Jesus had presented Himself, made known his firm conviction that God 
 had heard the cry of His people, and had provided the Messiah, though as 
 yet He had not disclosed Him. In his grand trust in God, he had told 
 the multitudes, " there standeth one among you, whom you know not — the 
 true Messiah," who has been among you, and you have not dreamed of it, 
 because you knew neither the marks nor nature of God's Anointed, and, 
 indeed, you will not recognise Him, even when He appears. That ye may 
 know Him, He is He who cometh after me, and yet shall be preferred 
 before me — the true Messiah, whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose. 
 He shall be preferred before me,/o9' He was before vie. He is no man of 
 moi'tal birth, for Scripture and Eabbi unite in recognising the Messiah as 
 the uncreated Word of God, sent down from heaven, to dwell for a time 
 among men." John's long communion with God in the wilderness, his 
 prayers a.nd tears, had raised him to a spiritual grandeur v/hich antici- 
 pated, with a higher than human sense, the yet uurevealed. Lifted above
 
 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS AND THE DEATH OF JOHN. 263 
 
 eartli, tlie advent of the Messiah liad become to him a living truth, which 
 only -waited God's time for its disclosure, and at last stood visibly before 
 him, in the Holy One who sought baptism at his hands. 
 
 No wonder he shrank from assuming to such a Being the relation in 
 which he stood to other men. He knew that only one who was wholly 
 free from sin could be the Messiah, and such an One he felt was before 
 him. The meekness, gentleness, and purity, which overawed him, spoke 
 of nothing less, and the heart of John, on the instant, could express its 
 overpowering emotion in no more fitting thought than that he " beheld 
 the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world." In such words \ 
 he embodied a conception which he had heard from the Eabbis since his 
 childhood, for the daily sacrifice, on whose head the sins of Israel were 
 laid by a foi'mal act, was their favourite type of the Messiah, who was ^ 
 hence known by the endearing name of the " Lamb of God." The sublime 
 picture in Isaiah of Him on whom Jehovah had laid the iniquities of His 
 people, and who was led as a Lamb to the slaughter, had already been 
 applied to the Messiah, and John might w'ell think of Him in this His 
 highest aspect, — oppressed in soul, as he himself was, by the weight of the 
 sins of his race. 
 
 The hesitation of the Baptist, however, was not allowed to prevail, for 
 Jesus still repeated His desire to be baptized. " Suffer it now," said He, 
 " for thus it becomes us to fulfil all righteousness. From whatever God 
 has required of Israel as a duty, I cannot withhold myself." Baptism was 
 an ordinance of God, required by His prophet as the introduction of the 
 new dispensation. It was a part of " righteousness," that is, it was a part 
 of God's commandments, which Jesus came into the world to show us the ■ 
 example of fulfilling, both in the letter and the spirit. Moreover, He had 
 not yet received the consecration of the Spirit, abiding on Him, and had 
 not yet assumed the awful dignity of the Messiah, but had hitherto been 
 only the unknown villager of Nazareth. No subject is more mysterious 
 than the " increase in wdsdom " which marked the Saviour, as it does all 
 other men, nor can we conjecture when it was that the full realization of 
 His Divine mission first rose before Him. As yet there had been no indi- 
 cation of its having done so, for He had not yet " manifested His glory," 
 or appeared at all before men. Is it too much to believe that His baptism [ 
 was the formal consecration, which marked His entrance on His great \ 
 office? 
 
 John resisted no longer, and leading Jesus into the stream, the rite was 
 performed. Can we question that such an act was a crisis in the life of 
 our Lord ? His perfect manhood, like that of all other men, in all things 
 except sin, forbids our doubting it. Holy and pure before sinking under \ j ^ 
 the waters. He must yet have risen from them with the light of a higher 
 glory in His countenance. His past life Avas closed ; a new era had 
 opened. Hitherto the humble villager, veiled from the world. He was 
 henceforth the Messiah, openly working amongst men. It was the true 
 moment of the opening of His new life. Past years had been buried in \ \ 
 the waters of Jordan. He entered them as Jesus, the Son of Man ; He 
 rose from them, The Christ of God.
 
 264 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Nor is it wondei'ful that, at a moment when He was passing through 
 such a supreme spiritual crisis, there should have been sympatliy with it 
 in the distant regions of the Universe. " Being baptized," says St. Luke, 
 " and praying " — in the overpowering emotion of sucli a time— the heaven 
 was opened— all hindrances of human weakness withdrawing, so that 
 the eye seemed to pierce the sky, to the far off heavenly splendours. And 
 now a vision as of the Holy Gliost descending in the " bodily form" of a 
 dove, the symbol of purity and peace, and resting over the newly baptized 
 as in permanent consecration, revealed itself to John and Jesus ; a heavenly 
 voice, meanwhile, proclaiming, " This is My beloved Son, in whom I am 
 well pleased." Isaiah had, long before, foretold how the Spirit of Jehovah 
 should rest upon the Branch from the roots of Jesse — the Spirit of wisdom 
 and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of know- 
 ledge, and of fear of the Lord, and the prediction Vv^as now fulfilled. It 
 was the Divine anointing of Jesus, to preach good tidings to the meek, to 
 bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the 
 opening of the prison to them that are bound, to proclaim the acceptable 
 year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of God — the consecration from 
 on High to the office of Messiah, and, as such, the true birth-hour of 
 Christianity. It was His solemn designation as the Great High Priest of 
 the new and abiding Dispensation. The sons of Aaron were required by 
 the Levitical Law to be set apart to their high office by washing and 
 anointing, and He who was to be clothed with an infinitely loftier priest- 
 hood, could not be allowed to want a correspondingly grander inaugura- 
 tion. Instead of the Tcmjile made with hands. He had around Him the 
 great Temple of nature ; for the brazen laver He had the flowing river, 
 reflecting the vault of heaven. If He had no golden robes, He had the 
 robe of a sinless righteousness, and if there were no sacred oil, He had, 
 instead, the anointing of the Holy Ghost. John had already, by Divine 
 intimation, learned that the Spirit should thus descend on Him who was 
 to baptize with the Holy Ghost, and thus saw the confirmation of his belief 
 that Jesus was, indeed, the Lamb of God, and His Son. How long He 
 remained with John is not told us, but it would seem as if He had forth- 
 with retired to the wilderness, to return only after His temptation. 
 
 The great work of John was now over. As Samuel had once conse- 
 crated the earthly David king over the outward theocracy, the last of the 
 pro{)hets had consecrated a greater king, who should rule, by other means, 
 over a kingdom wholly different, though John, standing as He did, out- 
 side, could at best only dimly conjecture these characteristics of the new 
 Messianic reign. He lived and worked long enough after this crowning 
 moment, to rejoice over tlie first advances of the new theocracy he had 
 called into being, but also long enough to show that he did not compre- 
 hend its spirit, as he would have done, had he lived later. His days were 
 numbered. Those in power feared his words and work, which gave him 
 supreme influence among the people. The priests and Rabbis had failed ' 
 in their plots against him, but what they could not themselves do, they 
 wore ere long able to effect through one of greater power for evil. 
 
 John seems latterly to have moved from place to place, along both banks
 
 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS AND THE DEATH OF JOHN. 265 
 
 of the Jordan, both north and south. How long he continued to labour ia 
 not known, but he was still baptizing after Jesus had begun His ministry 
 at the marriage feast of Cana. The popularity of Jesus had roused the 
 jealousy of the disciples of the Baptist, and had even led to angry feeling. 
 A dispute with a Jew— probably a disciple of Jesus — respecting baptism, 
 brought matters to a crisis. He had, apparently, claimed for that of 
 Jesus a higher power of cleansing from the guilt of sin than that of their 
 Master. Irritated and annoyed, John's followers returned and told him 
 how He " who had been with him beyond Jordan, to whom he had borne 
 witness, was baptizing, and that all men were now coming to Him. The 
 news only seemed to bring the grand humility of the Baptist more pro- 
 minently than ever into view, and showed him to be above any selfish or 
 petty thought ; a man to whom the will of God was the abiding law. " He 
 must increase," said he, " but I must decrease, for He is the Christ, the 
 Bridegroom. I rejoice greatly to hear His voice. He is from above, and, 
 therefore, above all : I am only of the earth, and speak as such. He has 
 received the testimony of heaven : He has the power of life and death : 
 He is the beloved Son, into whose hand the Father has committed all 
 things." With this grand utterance, John disappears into the gloom of a 
 prison. He had been a "lamp," as Jesus calls him, burning brightly in 
 his day, but the Light of the world had now risen, and his light must grosv 
 dim jind expire. 
 
 John owed his imprisonment to Herod Antipas, in whose territories he 
 had sought safety, and the opportunity of carrying on his work in peace. 
 The cause assigned before the people for his arrest, was that John had 
 ventured to reprove Herod for his unlaAvful marriage with Herodias ; but 
 political fears had, probably, in reality, more to do with it. Herod, with 
 the crafty cunning for which Jesus afterwards si^oke of him as " the fox," 
 was afraid that John might turn his wide popularity to political account, 
 and head a religious rising, perhaps like that of Judas the G-aliltean, for 
 all men seemed ready for anything he might advise. He held it, there- 
 fore, better, says Josephus, to anticipate any attempt at revolution, by 
 imprisoning him, and, if needs were, by putting him to death, rather than 
 lament a disturbance after it had broken out. 
 
 Antipas, it seems, passed his time, now in Tiberias, then in Machaerus, 
 on his southern border, in Perea. In him, the hierarchy and Kabbis at 
 Jerusalem, impotent themselves, found an instrument to crush the un- 
 licensed teacher who so freely condemned them, and had so great a hold 
 upon the people. Pilate, ever fearful of any popular movement, may 
 have demanded, at their crafty instigation, that action should be taken, 
 and these influences, added to the apprehensions of Antipas himself, 
 brought matters to a crisis. Sending a band of soldiers and police north- 
 wards to the Jordan, a distance of from six to eight hours, they appre- 
 licndcd the Baptist, perhaps by night, when tlae people were not astir, and, 
 binding the defenceless man, hurried him off to the fortress Machaerus. 
 
 This castle, known as " the diadem," from its crown-like seat on the 
 lofty rocks, and as " the black tower," lay on the east side of the Dead Sea, 
 almost on a line with Bethlehem. It was the southern stronghold of Perea,
 
 2o6 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 as the Macedonian colony of Pella was the northern. Nature, herself, had 
 here raised a stronghold, as she had that of Masada, on the other side of the 
 Dead Sea, a little farther south. It lay above the deep gorge that divides the 
 mountains of Abarim from the range of Pisgah, in the wild region where, 
 from immemorial tradition, the Jews sought the grave of Moses. Af ew miles 
 to the north, in a deep, rugged valley, lay Callirrhoe, famous for its warm 
 baths, where the dying Herod had sought relief, and had nearly met his 
 death. Its hot springs burst at one spot from the rocks in the bottom of 
 the gorge, and, near tliem, others poured forth water of the iciest coldness, 
 while the hills round were ia those days pierced with mines of sulphur 
 and alum. The torrent of Zerka Ma'in, descending between walls of ba- 
 salt, and red, brown, and black volcanic tuff, rushes throiTgh the ravine, 
 over a channel of huge rocks, from the uplands of Perca to the east shore 
 of the Dead Sea. At a short distance south, the "Wady Z'gara runs east 
 and west, in a profound gorge, with precipitous sides, at some parts eight 
 hundred feet high, cleaving its wild way, by leaps, down three thousand 
 eight hundred feet, to the Dead Sea. A parallel valley succeeds, along 
 the hollow of which ran the old Roman road, joining Machaerus with 
 Callirrhoe, and with the great road from Petra to Damascus. Rising from 
 this ravine, the long mountain ridge of Attaroth stretches, in heaped-up 
 confusion, ten miles to the south-west, and on the highest point of this, 
 where it sinks sheer down towards the Zerka Ma'in, the ruins of Machaerus, 
 in great masses of squared stone, still overhang the gloomy depth below. 
 At the foot of the isolated cliff on which the fortress was built, and sepa- 
 rated from it by a deep and narrow valley, not quite a mile across, lie the 
 ruins of the town of Machaerus, covering more than a square mile, showing 
 in the remains of a Temple of the Sun, that, along with the fanatical Jewish 
 population, it must have had many heathen, that is, Greek or Roman 
 citizens, who were allowed to practise their idolatry in peace. 
 
 The first fortress had been raised here by Alexander Jannseus, but it 
 was afterwards destroyed by Gabinius, in his war against Aristobulus. 
 / When Herod came to be king, however, his keen eye saw the strength of 
 ' the position, and he determined to restore the castle as a frontier defence 
 '' against the Arabs. Surrounding a large space with walls and towers, he 
 built a city from which a path led up to the citadel, on the top of the hill. 
 The citadel itself was at one end of a narrow ridge, nearly a mile in length 
 from east to west, and formed a last retreat in case of attack, but it was 
 not enough for his magnificent ideas. At the other end of the height, he 
 raised a great wall, enclosing the summit of the hill, with toAvers two 
 hundred feet high at the corners, and in the sjaace thus gained built a 
 grand palace, with rows of columns of a single stone a-piece, halls lined 
 with many-coloured marbles, magnificent baths, and all the details of 
 Roman luxury, not omitting huge cisterns, barracks, and storehouses, with 
 everything needed for defence in case of siege. The detached citadel was 
 the scene of John's imprisonment ; a stern and gloomy keep, with under- 
 ground dungeons, still visible, hewn down into the living rock. The 
 fortress-palace, at the other end of the fortifications, at the time the 
 residence of Antipas and his retainers, was merry with their revelry, but
 
 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS AND THE DEATH OP JOHN. 267 
 
 the dungcou of John lay in miduiglit darkness. From liis windows 
 Antipas had a magnificent view of the Dead Sea, the Avhole course of the 
 Jordan, Jerusalem, Hebron, the frowning fortress of Masada, the circle 
 of Jordan, and the cliffs of Bngedi, on the west, and of the mountains 
 of Gilead, rising bej'ond the wihl heights of Pisgah, on the north ; but 
 his captiye, the child of the boundless wilderness, pined in perpetual 
 night. 
 
 Beneath this stronghold, perched on the top of the highest summit of 
 the wild region, the yalleys sank in unscalable precipices, on three sides, 
 to such a depth that Josephus is well-nigh excused for thinking that the 
 eye could not reach their bottom. The fourth side was only a little less 
 terrible. Wild desolation reigned far and near, but the hidden hollows of 
 some of the gorges were luxuriant with palms, olives, and vines, and 
 superstition believed, that, among other wonders, there grew in them a 
 plant, fiery red in coloiu-, and shedding rays of flame in the evening, which 
 had power to expel demons and heal diseases, though only to be pidled at 
 the cost of life. Sectzen, a German traveller, who re-discovered the site 
 in 1807, has left a vivid picture of the landscape round. Masses of lava, 
 brown, red, and black, are varied with pumice stone, or black basalt, in 
 huge broken masses, or perpendicular cliffs, resting on white limestone ; 
 and then, again, dark brown rocks — the iron-mountain of Josephus. The 
 rushing stream beneath is overgrown with oleanders and date-palms, 
 willows, poplars, and tall reeds, while hot sulphur springs gush from the 
 clefts of the rocks, sending up a thick mist of steam. 
 
 In this wild, warlike place, lay John, cut off from the world, from 
 Israel, and from the grand work of national regeneration of which he was 
 the soul — in the midst of a population of soldiers, barbarians, Arabs, Idu- 
 means, Amorites, and Moabites, who ran no risk of being infected by his 
 words. Perhaps he was favoured beyond other prisoners by being brought 
 from his underground vault, after a time, to some cell of the corner 
 towers, to be near his captor. If so, he could look from his lonely height 
 over the regions of the Dead Sea and the Jordan, where the years of his 
 desert consecration, and the months of his great work, had been spent. 
 Yet he was no mere shadow of the past, but still a living power. No 
 strong hand had jirotected him ; no miracle had been vouchsafed by God 
 for his deliverance, and there was no hope of a rescue by the people, liovr- 
 ever they might regret him, or murmur at his fate. His prison, unap- 
 proachable on three sides, and reached, on the fourth, only by a bridle 
 path, tlu'ough numerous fortified gates, made escape impossible. ]S"or 
 could he hope to have support from any within the castle itself, for its 
 motley population of Arabs, Edomites, and Moabites, cared nothing for 
 the promises of Israel. The sheikhs of the wandering tribes around went 
 in and out, the troops of the garrison were reviewed and drilled, or lounged 
 round the battlements, and the courtiers of the haughty Herodias flashed 
 hither and thither in their bravery, through the town ; the hot springs of 
 the valley, and the bracing air of the mountain-top, gave new tone to the 
 nerves of the health-seekers frequenting them from all parts; but the 
 Baptist lay unheeded and helpless. Apart from political reasons, it was
 
 268 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 BO healthy a place that Antipas might well be fond of it. " Provisions," 
 says Josephus, "remained good for a hundred years in the fortress of 
 Masada, on the other side of the Dead Sea ; for the air, at the great height 
 of the castle, is piu-ified from every earthy or hurtful exhalation." Yet 
 there was no great bustle, for the place was too remote and secluded for 
 much intercourse with it. Ten thousand people lived in the town below, 
 but round John were only rough soldiery, drafted from the neighbouring 
 tribes, and the attendants on Herod, of whom Jesus speaks as " the people 
 gorgeously apparelled, who lived delicately," as became those in the courts 
 of kino's. Yet the nation, with unbroken faith, kept watch outside the 
 gates of the prison, and the breath of God still moved among them like 
 the soft wind through the leaves of summer. 
 
 Antipas had laid hands on John with the intention of putting him to 
 death, and there were those round him who grudged him each day's life, 
 but fear of the people kept "the fox" from his jDurpose, for a time, as a 
 similar dread on the part of the hierarchy at Jerusalem, afterwards pro- 
 tected Jesus. Yet his prison was no mere detention, for prisons in 
 antiquity, and especially in the East, had no refinements of mercy. The 
 words of Christ — " They did to him whatsoever they pleased," are signifi- 
 cant, and point to torture, insult, and ill-treatment. The spirit that called 
 for the blind Samson to be brought from his prison, to make sport before 
 the Philistine lords, was still in full vigour. 
 
 But John, though defenceless, had a kingly divinity of truth and good- 
 ness, that, for a time, hedged him round from death. Brought before 
 Antipas, once and again, to be shown off to the crowd at his table, he 
 remained so completely himself, that the tyrant, for the moment, became 
 the inferior of the helpless prisoner. Feeling how awful goodness is, he 
 " feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and kejit 
 him closely ; and when he heard him he was very anxious, and heard him 
 gladly." Even he, for the instant, looked towards God and heaven ! 
 Uneasy conscience, superstition, a natural indisposition to violence, and 
 the slow cruel delays of Eastern justice, left John alive. He was even 
 alloAvcd to have intercourse with some of his people, whose love braved 
 personal danger, and brought them to his prison to visit him. Perhaps, 
 as with St. Paul, when a prisoner at Caesarea, thirty years later, it was 
 formally permitted that "he should have liberty, and that none of his 
 acquaintance should be forbidden to minister or come unto him ; " or, very 
 likely, the loose ways of the East, so different from strict Roman practice, 
 left access to him possible. His disciples came and went, brought him 
 news from the outer world, and told him of the preaching of the Kingdom, 
 that had begun in Galilee — perhaps shared his imprisonment, in turn, 
 listened to his instructions, and went forth on messages connected with 
 his great work. Antipas had, however, nothing to fear in all this, and the 
 Baptist had as little to hope. His disciples had held badly together, 
 since their head was taken from them. They clung firmly only to the 
 external, ascetic side of his teaching, as might have been expected, striving 
 to outdo the Pharisees in washings and fasts, and they went about sad, 
 because the Bridegroom was taken from them. Perhaps, some of them
 
 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS AND THE DEATH OF JOHN. 2G9 
 
 still preached the coming of the Kingdom, and baptized penitents, but the 
 crowds fell off, in great part, after John's imprisonment, and flocked to the 
 new projohet, whom he himself had baptized. 
 
 To men trained in Jewish ideas, there was much that seemed strange 
 and doubtful in the teaching that had thus superseded that of John. The 
 works of Jesus were mighty, but His disciples did not fast. The Elijah- 
 like sternness of the preaching in the wilderness of Judea, was not found 
 in that of the shores of the Lake of Tiberias. There was no word of any 
 oj^en assumption of the office of Messiah, nor any signs of the approaching 
 erection of a purified theocracy. There were no preparations for the 
 triumph of Israel, and no symptoms of the wrath of God breaking forth 
 on their oppressors. As a Jew, John must have shared, more or less, in 
 the universal belief of his nation, that, however pure, the kingdom of the 
 Messiah was to be an earthly dominion over Israel, when it had been de- 
 livered from the polluting presence of the heathen, and had been marked, 
 once more, as the people of God, under Him alone. The news he received 
 seems to have made him almost waver in his belief in Jesus, as the Messiah 
 thus expected, for the human mind in loneliness, disappointment, and im- 
 perfect knowledge, is prone to read things by the dull light of the present, 
 rather than by the evidence of the past. In moments of weakness and 
 despondency, it is easy to think that our whole life has been a dream, and 
 our fondest hopes mere illusions. The Gospels seem to point at such a 
 momentary depression in the mind of John. As if he had been lost in 
 thought over what he had heard from his visitors, he sent to Jesus for a 
 solution of his doubts. " Now, when John heard in the prison of the 
 works of the Christ, for they had told him concerning all these things " — 
 the miracle of the centurion's servant, and of the young man just raised 
 from the bier at Nain — " having called unto him two of his disciples, he 
 sent, through them, to the Lord, and said to Him, ' Ai't Thou the Coming 
 One, or must we look for another ? ' And the men came to Him and said : 
 •John the Baptist has sent us unto Thee saying, "Art Thou the Coming 
 One, or must we look for another ? " ' In that hour He healed many of 
 diseases, and plagues, and evil spirits ; and unto many blind He granted 
 sight. And He answered, and said unto them, ' Go and tell John what ye 
 saw and heard, that the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are 
 cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the Gospel 
 preached unto them ; ' " and then He added, as if to bring John back from 
 his doubts, " and blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended at Me." 
 The whole answer showed a fulfilment of the words of Isaiah respecting 
 the Messiah, which must have sunk deep into the heart of one to whom 
 that great prophet was an anticipatory Gospel. John would remember 
 that in one place it was written — " Your God will come and save you. 
 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall 
 be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of 
 the dumb sing ; " and in another — " The Spirit of the Lord God is upon 
 me ; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the 
 meek ; to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, 
 and the opening of the jirison to them that are bound; to proclaim the
 
 270 TEE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 acceptable year of the Lord." Jesus could have given him no proof more 
 toTiching that He was indeed the Messiah. 
 
 This was the summer of John's captivity, but the winter was fast 
 approaching, Antipas, and, perhaps, Herodias, and the local court around 
 them, were curious to see and hear the man who had played so great a 
 part. At first, mere idle curiosity, like that which afterwards made him 
 anxious to see Jesus, — though he ended his interview by " setting Him at 
 nought and mocking Him," — made him have John brought before him. 
 Perhaps the mingled motives which led Agrippa II., Berenice, and Drusilla, 
 to have Paul brought into their presence, led to the Baj^tist being called 
 into the palace. To hear anything unpleasant from one in their power 
 was not to be imagined. The sight of him would break the monotony of 
 an afternoon, and give something to talk about for the evening. But he 
 v/as no man for royal halls. Life was too real for him to deal in smooth- 
 tongued flatteries and deceits. He made an impression on the court, 
 though it was far too proud and trifling to think of anything so vulgar as 
 repentance. Like St. Paul before Felix and Drusilla, but in quite another 
 mode, he was a preacher of righteousness, temperance, and judgment, 
 though in bonds. " It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife," 
 said the fearless man, — in the grand superiority of religious zeal, — to him 
 who had his life in his hands. Perhaps Antipas had wished to know what 
 he must do to secure an interest in the approaching political kingdom of 
 God, and was, thus, urged to prove his sincerity by breaking off a life of 
 sin. In the reproof, John set himself on the firm footing of the Mosaic 
 LaAV, which bound Herod, as a Jewish prince ; though the cowardly silence 
 of the hierarchy had allowed him to trample it under foot at his will, 
 without censure. " Herodias," says Josephus, " took upon her to confound 
 the laws of our country, and, having divorced herself from her husband 
 while he was alive, married Herod (Antipas), her husband's brother by 
 the father's side." The Law had repeatedly forbidden marriage with a 
 living brother's wife, threatening it with childlessness, as a grievous 
 scandal, and making no difference between brothers and half-brothers. 
 In the case of Antipas the transgi-ession was the greater, as John saw and 
 pointed out, for his marriage had only been effected by adultery on the 
 part of both wife and husband. Moreover, it had been brought about by 
 the most heartless outrage on the hospitality of a brother. To make the 
 whole more revolting, Herodias was the niece of Antipas ; but it was not 
 needed that John should touch on this relationship between them, for the 
 Law did not take notice of it, and the Herod family had long disregarded 
 such objections. 
 
 The disgraceful story dated back to the first or second year of Pilate. 
 In the year 26, or, more probably, 27, the whole family of the Herods had 
 gathered together to a feast in Jerusalem. To this act of piety, as it was 
 held, they had given a still higher value, in public opinion, by their action 
 in a matter which lay near the heart of a population zealous for the Law. 
 To prevent an insurrection, Pilate, in the year 26, had reluctantly with- 
 dra-\vn the standards with their supposed idolatrous emblems, set up 
 before the Castle Antonia. But his offended pride had not forgotten the
 
 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS AND THE DEATH OF JOHN. 271 
 
 humiliatiou, and lie, now, to efface the remembrance of it, had hung votive 
 tablets on the palace in Zion. They were golden shields, dedicated to 
 Tiberius, like those everywhere suspended in the temples, in honour of 
 the gods, as acknowledgment of some deliverance, or signal blessing in 
 health or fortune, received at their hands. They got their name from 
 having been vowed beforehand, in case a divine favour earnestly desired, 
 should be vouchsafed. On those he now introduced, Pilate inscribed only 
 his own name and that of Tiberius, but the Jews denounced them as 
 idolatrous, and raised a great clamour for their removal. The letter of 
 the Law might not condemn them, but they had homage paid them, like 
 altars, and, hence, were an abomination. The four sons of Herod took up 
 the defence of the Law, thus outraged in spirit, and on Pilate referring 
 the matter to the Emperor, to escape a second humiliation, a deputation 
 was sent off to Eome. It happened that Antipas also had business at 
 Eome at the time, and as he set out on it now, the people saw in his 
 journey a further proof of his piety, as they never doubted he had gone in 
 support of their cause. But he had adultery in his heart while affecting 
 zeal for religion. 
 
 Among the members of the Herod family present at the family feast 
 was Herod Boethos, the son of Herod the Great and the second Mariamne, 
 the famous Jerusalem beauty of her day, whose father, an Alexandrian 
 Jew, Herod had raised to the high priesthood, in honour of the alliance 
 with his daughter. This Herod Boethos had married Herodias, the grand- 
 daughter of his father and the first Mariamne, and daughter of Ai-istobulus, 
 one of Mariamne's murdered sons. The uncle had thus married the niece, 
 but this was nothing strange in the Herods. When Antipas came to 
 Jerusalem, to the feast, Herod Boethos made him his guest, as his half- 
 brother. Never was hospitality worse repaid. 
 
 The fail', impetuous, ambitious Herodias presently made a complete 
 conquest of the weak, unprincipled Antipas. He soon found himself 
 entangled in an intrigue with the wife of his hospitable brother, though 
 he had long been married to the daughter of a powerful neighbour, Aretas, 
 king of the Nabateans, whose dominions were conterminous with his own 
 on the south, with Petra for capital. Herodias had been married, by her 
 grandfather Herod, to Herod Boethos, or Herod Philip, as he was also 
 called, now a man approaching fifty, to mitigate the misfortunes of her 
 family, left fathei'less by his cruel murder of his son Aristobulus. She 
 had had, as her only child, a daughter, Salome, now married to Philip, 
 tetrarch of Iturea, the brother of Antipas, who was a man in middle life ; 
 Herodias, herself, being a woman of thirty-four or thirtj^-five, or perhaps, 
 some years older. Divine and human laws have seldom been more shame- 
 lessly violated than by Antipas, while he was playing the part, in public, 
 of a zealous defender of religion. The vice of Herodias ran in her veins 
 with the blood of Herod and of his sister Salome, for their worst qualities 
 were revived in her nature. Her husband, who had once been named as 
 Herod's heir, but had been blotted from the will when his mother was 
 detected in the plot of Bagoas the eunuch, seems to have led an idle and 
 insignificant life as a private man, much to Mio discontent of his imperious,
 
 272 THE LIFE OF CHRIST, 
 
 ambitious wife. She was ready, tliercfore, to intrigue with a crowned 
 prince, though her brother-in-law, and promised to come to him, as soon 
 as he returned from Eome. It was agreed, however, that Antipas should 
 first divorce his wife, the daughter of Aretas. 
 
 Antipas set off to Eome with this arrangement. It was to be carried 
 out as soon as he came back again to his palace at Tiberias, though he, 
 doubtless, looked for trouble in effecting his divorce from the daughter of 
 the Nabatean king. To his satisfaction, however, she had spared hira any 
 difficulty. The treachery which, from of old, prevailed in the courts of 
 the Herods, had revealed her husband's relations to Herodias, and she 
 resolved to leave him. She asked no more than permission to visit the 
 border fortress, Machaerus, which had formerly belonged to the Herods, 
 but, at the time, was in her father's hands, perhaps as the purchase price, 
 in Eastern fashion, of his daughter. Its hot springs were in great repute 
 as a health resort. Aretas at once took steps to carry her farther off. 
 Conducted by Arab sheikhs, she was led to her family palace at Peti-a, and 
 her father declared the marriage annulled. Antipas received Machaerus 
 back ; whether by treaty, craft, or force, is not known. Perhaps the Arab 
 feared the tetrarch, as one high in the Emperor's favour; perhaps Antipas 
 exchanged the fortress for other concessions. In any case, the peace was 
 not disturbed for the time, and Herodias left her husband, and came to 
 the palace at Tiberias. 
 
 The whole shameful transaction had been carried out in the very region 
 of John's earlier ministrations, and had, doubtless, created a great sensa- 
 tion in tlie districts nearest the Arab kingdom. Public policy felt it a 
 mistake to have I'epudiated the daughter of a dangerous neighbour ; the 
 Law and its representatives 'denounced as a crime the marriage with a 
 brother's wife. Even in his own family, the hateful marriage, with its 
 double adultery, wrought division, cutting Antipas off from all his blood. 
 It was the weak point of his otherwise cautious reign, which had guarded 
 against offending the religious sensitiveness of the people, and it left his 
 frontiers exposed to the anger of Aretas, in revenge for the insult. 
 
 It is possible that a matter so widely mooted among the people, may 
 have been referred to by John before he was carried off to Machaerus. 
 But the Gospels inform us, that the fearless man reproved Herod resjDect- 
 ing it, face to face, perhaps before all his court. If he had been brought 
 for a show, and let loose this shaft at the sleeping conscience of Antipas, 
 before his partner in guilt and the gay parasites round, no scene could 
 have been more dramatic. But the man who had spoken such words could 
 not be allowed to live. Herodias Avas determined he should pay for his 
 rashness with his life, and lost no opportunity of working on Antipas to 
 give the command for his execution. 
 
 The bitter fruits of the marriage were already springing up, to poison 
 the tetrarch's remaining years. The curse of cliildlessness, denounced by 
 the Law on such a crime, was fulfilling itself. The father of his repudi- 
 ated wife threatened war for the insult to his daughter, and Antipas waa 
 engrossed by efforts to prepare for it, if he could not prevent it. Long, 
 fierce wrangling passed, after a time, into open hostility, and Antipas was
 
 THE EAPTISM OF JESUS AND THE DEATH OF JOHN. 273 
 
 so .sliamefully defeated tliafc he had to appeal to the Emijeror for aid, and 
 kept his thi'one, for the time, only by his support. Perhaps Jesus referred 
 to this uneasy time when He asked, " What king, going to make war 
 against another king, will not first sit down and consult whether he is 
 able, Avith 10,000, to meet him that comes against him with 20,000 ? 
 Otherwise, while he is yet a great way off, having sent an embassy, lie 
 asks conditions of peace." To make his position still more unhappy, John 
 had touched his conscience to the quick by his reproofs. Should he put 
 him to death, and thus, at once, avenge such a liberty with one who wore 
 the purple, and bring to an end all fear of political trouble, through the 
 bold man's influence on the people ? Herodias sedulously kept alive the 
 struggle in her husband's breast, between conscience and fear, and passion 
 and piide. She herself was douljly touched, for John had recalled her 
 violation of her first duty as a wife, and the ghastly fact that she had been 
 the virtual seducer of him whom she now had in her jiower. But Antipas, 
 for once, would not give way to the murderous wish of Herodias. He 
 spared the Baptist's life, protected him from the snares of his unscrupu- 
 lous enemy, and even made his imprisonment beai'able, as far as was 
 possible. It was no friendly feeling, however, that moved him thus, but 
 the involuntary homage of even a bad nature to the unbending truth and 
 moral grandeur of his prisoner— a homage akin to fear — which made him 
 tremble hereafter at the report of the miracles of Jesus, in the belief that 
 it was John risen from the grave, clothed with the supernatural powers of 
 the other world. 
 
 " Herod, though in his palace, surrounded with his royal guards, feared 
 him. He knew the Baptist was stronger then he, for truth is mighty, and 
 mightily prevaileth : and being already conscious of his offendings, and 
 having enough to do to keep down the voices of crime and transgression 
 within him, he feared this righteous man, whose words gave such edge to 
 his self-acciisations, such point to his remorse. Unarmed, the Baptist 
 daunted him more than an army of men, an embattled city, or a fenced 
 tower, or any other source of phj'sical and outward force. It reminds me 
 of the saying of the first James, when Knox's daughter came to petition 
 for her husband Welsh's pardon. The monarch asked her who she was ; 
 she rejolied, ' Tlie daughter of John Knox.' ' Knox and Welsh,' said he, 
 ' that is a fearful conjunction of bloods. And had your father any sous ? 
 ' No, only three daughters.' ' Had his three daughters been three sons,' 
 said the conscience-stricken monarch, 'I would ill have brinkcd' (enjoyed) 
 ' my three kingdoms in peace. Ho may return, if he will consent never to 
 preach again.' ' Sooner than he should consent to that,' said the godly 
 and heroic woman, ' I would kep ' (catch as it fell from the block) ' his 
 bloody head here,' — stretching out the matronal apron in which she was 
 attired." 
 
 That Antipas thus stood between his prisoner and the Jezebel who 
 thirsted for his death, and even protected him, in a wild border district 
 where human life was held in no regard, was a noble tribute to the great- 
 ness of John, for none but a lofty soul could have made such an impression 
 on the weak, selfish, sensual, knavish being, in whose prison he lay, or 
 
 I
 
 274 TUE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 could have roused, even in such a nature, whatever it had of good, to a 
 struggle with 'overpowering evil. It was, almost, the raising of a son of 
 Abraham from the stones of the wilderness. The tyrant's alarm and Avant 
 of resolution, his consciousness of guilt and involuntary awe, fenced round 
 the life of the Baptist for the time, till the furious Avoman, whose dismissal 
 John had demanded, after vainly trying to gain her end by wild revenge, 
 reached it, at last, by craft. 
 
 Antipas had had the good fortune, by no means common with tlie vassals 
 of Tiberius, to keep his throne for over thirty years, and, like his father, 
 had been accustomed to celebrate the anniversary of his accession, each 
 summer, by a banquet. The time for this had now returned, and an 
 invitation to a grand festivity on the occasion was given to the officei's in 
 attendance at Machaerus, the sheikhs of the neio-libourino- tribes, and the 
 high society within reach, including the lords, chief captains, and first men 
 of Galilee. Persius, the Roman satirist, has left us a notice of such a feast 
 on the " Herod's day," of some of the family, perhaps of Antipas. He 
 shows us the palace windows brilliantly illuminated and hung with 
 garlands of flowers ; the tables spread with every ostentation of luxury, 
 and the wine flowing freely. On this occasion, the mirth and rejoicing 
 ran high. Herodias, herself, was not present, for it is not the custom even 
 now, in the East, for the women to take jDart in the festivities of men. 
 But to do honour to the day, and to the company, her daughter S alom e, 
 the childless wife of the tetrarch Philip, had broken through the rule of 
 strict seclusion from the other sex, and had condescended, though a prin- 
 cess, and the daughter of kings, to dance before Antipas and his guests. 
 The dancing then in vogue both in Eome and the provinces, from its 
 popularity under Augustus, was very like that of our modern ballet. The 
 dancer did not speak, but acted some story by gestures, movements, and 
 attitudes, to the sound of music. Masks were used in all cases, to conceal 
 the features, but the other parts of the body, especially the hands and 
 arms, were called into action, and a skilful pautomimist could express 
 feelings, passions, and acts, with surprising effect. The subjects of the 
 dance were always mythological, and thus, an abhorrence to strict Jews, as 
 essentially heathen. The dress of the performer, like that of the dancers 
 in our ballet, Avas planned to show the beauty of the figure to the greatest 
 advantage, though it varied with the cliaracters represented. In the days 
 of Antipas there never was more than one dancer at a time, even when the 
 piece introduced both sexes. Women did not perform thus in public, in 
 these earlier times of the empire, but, as in the case of Salome, they did 
 not scruple to act at the private parties of the great. 
 
 Salome's ballet was a great success. The revellers were charmed, and 
 the weak head of Antipas, perhaps made weaker by wine, v,-as fairly turned. 
 He could not give away the humblest village without permission from 
 Tiberius, but forgetful of this, he vowed, in true Eastern exaggeration, to 
 do anything the dancer asked ; if it were to give her half of his kingdom. 
 Seizing the chance, she was yet too cautious to speak off hand, but retired 
 to considt her mother. Herodias, clutching the opportunity, had no hesi- 
 tation in her answer—" Ask the head of John the Bantist." Eeturnins
 
 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS AND THE DEATH OF JOHN. 275 
 
 at once, slic made the bloody request. Chagrined at the advantage taken 
 of him, and alarmed at its probable results, he yet had not the moral 
 courage to refuse it. His honour, he fancied, was compromised, for he 
 had put himself in Salome's power, before the company. Motioning, 
 therefore, to a soldier of the guard, he commanded him to bring John's 
 head. There was no warning given : the entrance of the messenger was 
 the signal for execution, and the head was presently brought in on a salver 
 and given to Salome, who took it out as a welcome present to her mother. 
 The mutilated body, cared for by loving disciples, was, perhaps the same 
 night, laid in a tomb. 
 
 It is a weird and ghastly story, but one ([uite in keeping with the 
 almost grotesquely liorrible incidents recorded of the half barbarous 
 com-ts of the East, and even of that of Eome, in this savage age. Hero- 
 dotus tells the story of the demand made by Amestris, wife of Xerxes, on a 
 birthday festival of her husband, that he should give up the wife of 
 Masistes to her jealous rage, and how, on her persisting, he fancied he 
 could not, on that day, refuse. 'No entreaty of the unfortunate jorince could 
 avail for his wife, whom he loved ; Xerxes having once cominanded her to 
 be given up to her rival. Nor is the grim parallel to the fury of Herodias 
 wanting, for the spearmen of Xerxes were forthwith sent by the frantic 
 Amestris, and cut her rival to pieces, throwing her in fragments to the 
 dogs. 
 
 In the year B.C. 53, after the battle of Karrha, the Parthian King, 
 Orodes, was celebrating the marriage of his son Pacorus when the actor 
 who played the part of Agave, in the Bacchce of Euripides, brought in the 
 half wasted head of Crassus on the stage, and the chorus rejjeated, with 
 loud, triumphant rejoicing, the well-known strophe — 
 
 " We biing from tlie mountain, 
 Borne to our borne, 
 The royal booty, the bleeding sport." 
 
 Nor was Rome itself less savage. Caligula often had men put to torture 
 before his guests at his feasts, and swordsmen, skilled in beheading, 
 amused the table by cutting off the heads of prisoners brought in from 
 their dungeons, to show their dexterity. At a public feast at Eome, ho 
 ordered the executioner to strike off the hands of a slave, accused of having 
 taken a silver plate from one of the couches, and made the poor wretch go 
 round and round the tables with his hands hanging on his breast from a 
 cord round his neck, a board being carried before him, inscribed with his 
 offence. 
 
 After the death of the Baptist, Antipas returned to Tiberias, haunted ])y 
 the remembrance of his victim. Salome went back to her elderly husband* 
 who had already built a tomb for himself, in Julias Bethsaida, and did not 
 long survive his marriage. Salome, left a widow, once more returned to 
 her mother. 
 
 The marriage had been a speculation of Herodias, who hoped thus to 
 get hold of the territory of her neighbour and son-in-law. But the scheme 
 failed, for the tetrarchy was forthwith incorporated with the province of 
 Syria. Antipas, hov/ever, still hankered after it, and turned wistful eyes
 
 276 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 towards it from liis palace at Tiberias, till, at last, it lured liim and 
 Hcrodias to ruin. 
 
 "The Baptist had done the Almighty good service— he had not turned 
 back, on any occasion, from his perilous duty— he had kept his N'azaritc 
 ritual, both in bodj^ and spirit, sustaining the one upon the simplest meat, 
 and the other upon the hardest conditions. The Almighty heard the 
 voice which he spoke always for His well-beloved Son ; He saw that he 
 spoke truth, and held his integrity steadfast unto the end. And, perceiv- 
 ing in His servant such noble and excellent qualities, He resolved to 
 jierfect him for a high place in heaven, and so directed his footstep.^! to the 
 fiery furnance of a court, that the temper of his truth and piety might be 
 purified manifold. And in the fiery furnace He walked with His servant, 
 so that his spirit was not harmed ; and having tliiis aimealed his nature to 
 the utmost which this earth could do. He took him hastily away, and 
 placed him among the glorified in heaven." 
 
 CHAPTEE XXVII. 
 
 THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 THE baptism of Jesus in Jordan, and His consecration immediately 
 after by the Holy Spirit, were the close of His private, and the 
 inau o-uration of His puljlic, life. Hitherto He had been the tinknown 
 and obscure villager of JSTazareth : henceforth He entered on His Divine 
 mission as the Messiah, or " Anointed" of God. The beginning of His 
 ministry, and the heavenly equipment needed to sustain Him in it, are 
 always referred, by the Apostles themselves, to this supreme occasion. 
 With them. His commission, and special endowment for His mighty woi-k, 
 dated from His baptism. " Ye know," says St. Peter, " what was spoken 
 of throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee, after the baptism which 
 John preached, concerning Jesus of Nazareth, that God anointed Him 
 with the Holy Spirit, and with power ; who went about doing good, and 
 curing all that were overpowered by the devil, for God was with Him." 
 A mysterious dignity imparted by this heavenly " anointing," filled Him, 
 consciously, with supernatural powers He had not hitherto displayed, and 
 raised Him from the subordinate and passive life of Nazareth, to the high 
 office of " Messenger of the Covenant," " the Messiah promised to the 
 fathers." 
 
 In the thirty years of His life in Nazareth, Jesus had done no miracles, 
 and had assumed no authority or public standing as a teacher. On the 
 contrary, He had so Avithdrawn into the shade of a studied obscurity, and 
 conformed to the daily life of those around, that no one, apparently, 
 suspected Him to be more than the humble villager He seemed. 
 
 The baptism in the Jordan, with its mysterious accompaniments — the 
 Heavenly Dove and the Voice of God— marked the dividing line in His 
 life. With such credentials, and such endowments. His call as the 
 Messiah was no longer doubtful. We know nothing of His spiritual
 
 THE TEMPTATION. 277 
 
 history while at Nazareth, beyond the fact that His thoughts expanded 
 with His years, for His "keeping on increasing in wisdom," can mean 
 nothing less. Presentiments must have often risen in His mind, but He 
 may have had no assurance that they were trustworthy — for His Divine 
 nature is a mystery— till formally " anointed with the Holy Spirit, and 
 with power." After His l^aptism, we can readily fancy Him, during His 
 stay at the Jordan, listening intently to the jjreaching of John, and watch- 
 ing the excited multitudes, till the conviction forced itself upon Him, that 
 the Law could no longer be the channel of salvation to the sin-stricken, 
 repentant crowds. The gift of the Spirit, and the words of the Heavenly 
 Voice, would confirm this conviction, and make it for ever certain that 
 the path into which John was introducing his converts, could not, of it- 
 self, lead to the fulness of truth and abiding peace of heart. The opened 
 heavens revealed a new relation of G od to man, which must be proclaimed ; 
 and in the holy symbol of the dove — the pledge in Noah's day that wrath 
 had turned to mercy — the chosen emblem of the Spirit of God, a vivid 
 lesson was given that peace could be won back to the troubled soul, and 
 the soul itself renewed, only by the soft and gentle influence of heavenly 
 grace. Set apart, by so august a consecration, as God's anointed, the 
 regeneration of the race, and the reconciliation of earth and heaven, were 
 henceforth entrusted to His hands. He had, till now, been silent ; but 
 forthwith began to proclaim that the kingdom of God was no longer, as 
 John had taught, near at hand, but had already come, and at once assumed 
 and exercised the highest kingly authority, as its Head ; working miracles 
 as a proof of His superhuman dignity ; bearing Himself in the Temple as 
 in His Father's House ; discoursing, as the Messiah, with Nicodemus. 
 He even took to Himself, from this time, the name of " The Son of Man," 
 derived from the vision of the Messiah in the Book of Daniel, and 
 universally accepted from that source, as the symbol of Messianic rank. 
 His baptismal consecration was forthwith followed by His taking His 
 place as king in the new theocracy ; ruling, and legislating, and displaying 
 all kingly power and dignity, henceforth, as the Messiah of God — Himself 
 Divine. 
 
 His baptism was, thus, the birth-hour of Christianity. Crowds sunk in 
 national and spiritual degradation, thronged the banks of the Jordan, 
 roused by the new Elias to a sense of their wants, but left to expectancy 
 for their future satisfaction. They longed for a last needful word, but 
 John was unable to add it. He could speak of the approach of the King- 
 dom of God, but he was only its herald, and could not act as its head, for 
 the Messiah, who was to give it life and form, was yet to come. His work 
 was a mighty movement, with no adequate end : his converts a mighty 
 host, without a watchword; his exhortations excited a deep yearning, 
 which they left unsatisfied. Such a spectacle must have stirred the soul 
 of Jesus to its lowest depths. Even before His installation as the Messiah, 
 He must have pondered the condition of His people, and longed, with all 
 the love of His Divine nature, to heal their troubles. It must have been 
 so even in Nazareth. The investiture at the Jordan only stamped with 
 heavenly approval the purposes that had been ripening in His breast from
 
 278 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 His earliest years. We cannot think of one like Jesus, so profoundly 
 religious, and so divinely compassionate, as at any time indifferent to tlie 
 supreme question of the reconciliation of man to God. The days and 
 nights passed, in later years, in solitary prayer, in the wilderness or in 
 the mountains, were, doubtless, only the repetition of far eai-lier commun- 
 ings with His Father, and with His own soul. But the Divine certainty ; 
 the imperative signal, that He should rise and gird Himself to the mighty 
 task of winning back the world to God ; the awful summons for which He 
 waited with hushed stillness. He first read in the sights and revelations of 
 the Jordan baiatism. The heavenly consecration was the Divine sanction 
 of His long-cherished but dimly realized purpose. The accompaniments 
 of His baptism made Him the head of the new spiritual theocracy, and 
 laid on Him the burden of giving Himself wholly to its establishment. 
 
 Everything around corroborated the indications of the heavenly vision. 
 The events predicted as inaugurating the advent of the Messiah, were 
 realizing themselves before Him, for had not Elias come again, in the 
 person of John, and had not the nation consecrated itself, in preparation 
 for the Messiah ? He, only, was wanting, whom the times themselves 
 could not give : the Coiiing One, who should set up, in its fulness, the 
 Divine 'Kingdom already begun. IsTo wonder that John, as he daily an- 
 nounced both the Kingdom and the Messiah, with unwavering faith, and 
 searched each group that came before him, in hopes of finding, at last, the 
 chosen of God, fixed his eyes with a settled and clear conviction on Jesus, 
 as Him for whom he was looking. The attitude of the Baptist towards 
 Him, was a corroboration of all the rest. His own consciousness of being 
 the Eternal Son of God ; the spectacle before Him ; the longings of His 
 jiity and holy love ; the wants of the times ; and, above all, the voice and 
 sign from Heaven, made it clear, that "lowly in heart" as He was. He was 
 nevertheless the Messiah. 
 
 The earliest chapters of the Gospels show with what majestic fulness 
 and dignity the Saviour rose to the height of this great commission. Ee- 
 cognising John as a noble servant of God, He yet took His place, from the 
 first, above him. John stayed behind in his Jewish limitations, leaving 
 the great work imperfect, but Jesus from the beginning stood a Kin.o- over 
 the souls of men, dispensing promises, scattering heavenly gifts, calming 
 fears, satisfying the cravings of the heart, raising an invisible and death- 
 less kingdom in the human spirit, and bearing Himself as, at once, God 
 and man. 
 
 It is, of course, wholly beyond us to conceive the mental struggle im- 
 plied in such a position, when it first opened before our Lord. It com- 
 mitted Him to meet and overcome the Prince of Darkness ; to bear the 
 sins of the world, as the spotless Lamb of God ; to withstand the opposi- 
 tion and hatred of men, their indifference, mockery, misconception, and 
 insensibility of heart ; to endure, in fact, the life, and at last to die the 
 death, of a martyr. Still more, it opened before Him an awful isolation 
 as the one Holy Being in a sinful world ; a fact which might well fill a 
 nature like His, of trembling sensibility and loving tenderness, with over- 
 powering emotion. No wonder it is said He was driven by the Spirit into
 
 THE TEMPTATION. 279 
 
 the wilderness. The mind needs calmly to survey tlie ground, aud gird 
 iteclf up to its task, planning its efforts, a-id guarding against failure, 
 before entering on any great enterprise, and He was " in all tilings like 
 His brethren." It is in retirejnent, and sacred communion with God and 
 one's own soul, that we refresh ourselves for oiu- greatest tasks. It was 
 in the solitudes of the mountains that Moses prepared himself for the work 
 of creating a people for God. The Baptist came from the wilderness to 
 enter on his work as a Eeformer; and St. Paul, after his conversion, 
 secluded himself for three years, no one knows whither, to make ready for 
 his commission to the nations. The wilderness, with its sacred quiet and 
 seclusion, was alone fitted for the retirement of Jesus. 
 
 To what part He withdrew Himself is not stated, but St. Mark adds the 
 vivid note that He was " witli the wild beasts," which excludes the idea of 
 even scattered human population. In this vast and lonely chamber of 
 meditation and prayer He remained for forty days, in intense concentra- 
 tion of soul on the work before Him. To be alone was to have every 
 thought rise in tiu'n : to have human weakness plead for indulgence, and 
 human fears counsel safety. ISTor could He escape graver trials. The 
 Prince of Darkness had, doubtless, often before attempted to overcome 
 Him, for " He was tempted in all points like as we are." It was meet 
 that the Anointed of God should be put to the test. The struggles through 
 which the soul comes to clearness, power, and decision, are themselves 
 temptations, for they imply that the mind has not yet emerged into the 
 calmness of settled triumph. We cannot conceive of Jesus escaping sug- 
 gestions to have entertained which would have been fatal. Temptations 
 must needs enter the firmest and holiest soul, else it cannot be said to be 
 tempted at all. They are the more inevitable the greater the task to be 
 undertaken, and serve the high end of separating it from possible error. 
 To let Satan do his worst was the needful preliminary to the final over- 
 throw of his kingdom, for success or failure at the first step determined 
 the future. ^ 
 
 The specific temptations recorded in the Gospels belong to the last days 
 of our Lord's seclusion, for, as the culmination of Satan's assaults, they 
 were subtly reserved till nature was well-nigh exhausted, and the power 
 of resistance weakest. But, though critical hours in life may justly be 
 regarded as especially times of temptation, an existence, like ours, which 
 is a constant choice between good and evil, is, throughout, a probation. 
 We know little of the spiritual world, and cannot say how far our actions 
 are determined for evil by ourselves, or how far active Satanic influences 
 may affect us ; for, as in our better, so in our guilty acts, the mind is con- 
 scious of a deliberate freedom of will. Like Adam, we feel that we are 
 "sufficient to have stood, though free to fall." Our character is but the 
 stamp on our souls of the free choice of good or evil we have made through 
 life. From childhood to the grave, the road is open to us all, on either 
 side, from the straight jaath of right. Nor are the only failures those of 
 open act. The soul is, in itself, a world, and evil thoughts count as acts 
 with the Eternal, if not at once repelled. Tet they must rise at every 
 moment, for the choice of right implies freedom to choose the opposite.
 
 280 THE LIFE OF CHBIST. 
 
 Milton is true to nature wlien he makes Satan tell the Saviour that he had 
 heard the angels' song at Bethlehem, and — 
 
 " From tliat runo seldom have I ceased to eye 
 Thy infancy, thy childhood, and thy youth, 
 Thy manhood last, though yet in private bred." 
 
 " He was a child, and grew in the grace and faculties of His nature, like 
 another child, into mature manhood, struggling with the temptations, and 
 spoiling the tempters of each stage of life." The probation of the desert 
 was only an outburst, more than usually violent, of that which had at- 
 tended Him, all through, as a condition of His humanity. 
 
 There are, however, supreme moments of trial, victory in which decides 
 the colour of our life, and breaks the force of future temptations in the 
 same directions, and such was that of the wilderness retirement. It is 
 part of the discipline of God, to make His servants perfect through suffer- 
 ing, and the Son of Man, the ideal of humanity, could not be made an 
 exception. Eetirement was indispensable for i^reparation. He needed to 
 survey His great commission in all its aspects, to determine the course 
 to be pursued in carrying it out, and realize the difficulties and dangers 
 He had to expect. The transition from the life of Nazareth — private, 
 calm, contemplative, unknown, industrious in a lowly vocation— to that of 
 a public teacher, and, still more, of the Messiah sent from God, raised a 
 multitude of thoughts which hurried Him away to solitude, and made Him 
 forget, for the time, even the wants of nature. 
 
 In this commotion of the bosom, conflicting resolutions and courses 
 must have readily been suggested. Even in the Scriptures, opposite 
 characteristics of the Messiah might seem to present themselves. The 
 future Saviour was pictured in one page as triumphing ; in another as 
 lowly and suffering. Man was to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, 
 but Israel had been fed with manna, miraculously supplied. Angels were 
 promised to protect the servants of God, but it was forbidden to tempt 
 the Divine goodness. The world was promised to the friend of God, and 
 on the other hand, the mark of true godliness was humility. 
 
 Moreover, had not Moses been appointed by God as the Lawgiver of 
 Israel ? Had not the constitution of the nation as a theocracy, with its 
 Temple service and sacrifices, been divinely instituted ? Had not a chosen 
 priesthood been set apart by God, and were not the promises of life and 
 prosperity linked with the observance of the Mosaic Law ? Was not the 
 promised Saviour described in Scripture as a Eoyal Hero, who would 
 restore the glory and power of the House of David, and as a Conqueror 
 and Ruler of the nations ? 
 
 Such thoughts must not only have raised temptations and disturbance in 
 the mind of Jesus : they necessitated His breaking away utterly from the 
 traditional interpretation of Scripture current in His day, and forced Him 
 to take a position of direct antagonism, as regarded it, to the whole body 
 of the Eabbis, and of the dominant Jewish schools. There was, thus, no 
 other way than to separate Himself in spirit from the theocracy, and pre- 
 pare for a life and death struggle with the ecclesiastical authorities of the
 
 THE TEMrXATION. 281 
 
 nation. He must take a position, iaconceivably painful to a lowly and 
 pure soul like His, exposing Himself to the appearance of sinning against 
 God, and of wilful disobedience to His ordained representatives. On the 
 one hand, He had before Him the allurements of a career of success and 
 honour, witli wealth, power, and fame ; on the other, He would be branded 
 as criminal and blasphemous, and gain only shame, poverty, and death. 
 But through all these clouds. His spirit, like the sun, held on in its tri- 
 umphant coui'se, to emerge in full glory, and scatter them from its path. 
 
 It was clear that the theocracy had served its day, and could not be 
 made the vehicle of the great work Jesus was to inaugurate. Religion 
 had outgrown it, and demanded something loftier, more spiritual and 
 more universal, and this Jesus had come to supply. Instead of forms and 
 outward preceiats, He was about to announce the grand conception of a 
 new Kingdom of God — a kingdom in whicli the heart w"ould Ije supreme. 
 Winning that over to God and holiness. He would, by it, transform man 
 into the image of God, and earth into that of heaven. His reign was to 
 be that of holy love in the breast, instead of a worthless service of rites 
 and forms. The grandeur of such an ideal it is impossible adequately to 
 realize. Till then, outward priesthoods, local temples, the slaying of 
 sacrifices, pompous rites and ceremonial law had been deemed essential. 
 But the consecration of Jesus as the Messiah, not of the Jews alone, but 
 of mankind, made the whole obsolete, as incompatible with a universal 
 religion. ISTo wonder His soul was well-nigh over -powered. He must 
 stand alone against the Avorld; must pass sentence on all its religious 
 wisdom, and must create a new world of spiritual thought. The grand 
 originality of soul whicli this required, if we may use the word without 
 irreverence, has nothing ajiproaching it in the history of our race. 
 
 So vast a conception must have raised endless questions, doubts, and 
 struggles, the more it was pondered, and the more all it involved was 
 perceived. But a lofty spiritual nature like His must have raised Him 
 wholly above all the human littlenesses which turn the soul from great 
 undertakings. The thought of self-jireservation, in the prospect of im- 
 measurable danger, would not affect Him. He, who when communing 
 with God forgot hunger and thirst, and taught that to be ready to lose 
 one's life was a fundamental condition of interest in the Divine kingdom, 
 had no craven thoughts of His own safety. 
 
 He was infinitively above every consideration of personal interest. 
 Neither the pleasures of life, nor the delights or duties of His great work, 
 could make Him value life for the sake of enjoying them. Even at the 
 approach of death the only regret that escapes Him is that He leaves His 
 disciples. The tenderly human shadow that passed over His soul at 
 Gethsemane and Calvary, was but the inevitable tribute to human weak- 
 ness, which all must jdeld. The greatness of His task alone weighed Him 
 down. He stood single against spiritual and worldly powers, against a 
 people who, from the days of Moses to the last prophet, had shown them- 
 selves lukewarm, obstinate, and slow to move, capricious, fretful, and 
 spiritually dead. The revival, under John, like many before, promised to 
 be a mere fire of thorns.
 
 282 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Even what wc may call the details of His great work must have ATeiglied 
 heavily on Jesus, in these momentous weeks. Milton makes Him wander 
 Tar into the depths of the desert — 
 
 "Musing and mucli revolving in His breast, 
 How liGst tlie mighty work He migbt begin 
 Of Saviour to mankind, and wliieli way first 
 Publish His God-like office, now mature." 
 
 The popular Jewish belief that the Messiah would be an eai^thly king, 
 found no response in His bosom, and this, in itself, darkened His future. 
 
 He had seen the pressure put by the Kabbis on John, to force him to 
 their side. Would not His own opposition to them cause, at least, in- 
 difference and neglect ; perhaps, even hatred ? He could only be a 
 spiritual Saviour ; they wished a political. He had no amljitiou, and 
 contemned earthly power. Even if the people refused to hear. He must 
 still witness to the truth. Then, should His kingdom be raised by human 
 agency, or by the arm of God ? Might not the Almighty think it meet to 
 overthrow all opposition of the Prince of Darkness, Rome, and the Jewish 
 hierarchy, and establish the new Divine kingdom by irresistible force ? 
 But He was not led away by such suggestions, however specious. Dis- 
 carding all thought of playing a great part among men. He chose lowliness 
 and obscurity for Himself, and the smallest beginnings for His kingdom, 
 letting it win its way slowly by the conquest of single souls, as was 
 demanded by its very nature. It was to rest on loyalty and love, which 
 must rise spontaneously in individual breasts. Success and results were 
 only subordinate. His work lay clear before Him : to live and to die as 
 the Lamb of God— the incarnation of infinite love, attracting humanity by 
 its holy charms ; His life an example. His death an atonement. 
 
 This was the great result of His long, secluded,' wilderness retirement. 
 He had surveyed the Avhole ground ; had communed much with His own 
 thoughts, and above all, with His Father, and came back to the world again 
 in victorious serenity, to proclaim Himself as coming in the name of God, 
 with no lingering fear of His task, or of any spiritual or human opposition. 
 
 The mental struggle of these weeks must, in any case, have been in- 
 tense ; but it became unspeakably harder by the presence of the powers 
 of evil, who sought to overcome Him face to face, ll^or is this only 
 metaphor. Jesus, Himself, always assigns temptation to the direct action 
 j of evil spirits on the soul. A subtle and mighty personality is always 
 i pre-supposed, ruling a mysterious kingdom of evil, from which he can 
 only be cast out when bound by one stronger than himself. As the 
 Messiah, Jesus proclaimed that He had come to destroy the power of this 
 great enemy of God and man, and, throughout all His ministry, constantly 
 assailed his kingdom, casting out devils from the possessed, as, at this 
 time. He bound and subdued Satan himself. 
 
 It is not necessary to suppose an outward and corporeal presence of the 
 arch-enemy. He is never spoken of as visible, except when Jesus saw him 
 fall, as lightning, from heaven. He is invisible when he tempts us, which 
 wo know he does, for he deceives the whole world, and there is no need to 
 suppose that he was present otherwise with our Lord, than by raising
 
 THE TEMPTATION. 283 
 
 suggestions iu His sinless mind. To act upon the thoughts may have 
 been the mode of Satan's attack, with Clirist as Vv'ith oui'selves. 
 
 The three instances of the great enemy's attempts, recorded in the 
 GospeLs, illustrate the subtlety of his advances. Worn with hunger, 
 Christ is approached with the suggestion that if, indeed. He Avere what He 
 claimed to be, the Son of God, it was surely unnecessary to suffer as He 
 did, when by a word He might command that the stones of the desert 
 around Him should be made bread. To possess unlimited power for 
 specific ends, and refrain from using it to our own advantage, even in a 
 pressing and apparently innocent case, is an ideal of virtue which it 
 would be vain to expect in any ordinary man. No temptation is more 
 difficult to resist than the prompting to do what seems needful for self- 
 preservation, when abundant means are in our hands. But Jesus did not, 
 for a moment, allow Himself to question His duty. The miraculous -gifts 
 newly conferred on Him, had been given, not for His private use, but for 
 the glory of His Father ; not as a human convenience, but as spiritual aids 
 in His work as the Messiah. As a man. He was dependent on the care 
 and love of His Heavenly Father, and to use His miraculous powers as 
 the Messiah, for His personal benefit, would be to take Himself out of His 
 Father's hands, and to show distrust of His loving care. But His sublime 
 trust in the infinite goodness and power of God repelled the temptation. 
 God had brought Him hither, and would bring Him thence. Bread was 
 not the only means by which He could support Him. His word could 
 create what means He pleased. Others had been preserved by Him in 
 unforeseen ways. The tribes in the wilderness had been fed by manna. 
 Moses and Elijah had been sustained in the desert, though bread was 
 wanting. It was not for Him to think Himself forgotten, and to take His 
 life into His own hands, as if unsafe in God's. He would wait till HE 
 gave Him what He chose, in the way that pleased Him. 
 
 The second temptation, following the order in the third Gospel, was no 
 less subtle. The Kingdom of the Messiah as then understood, and as 
 Jesus, no doubt, had from youth been taught, was to be an universal 
 temporal dominion. In the solitude of the desert — His mind filled with 
 the thought of His mysterious consecration as God's Anointed — the 
 thought was insinuated by the great enemy, that He might well ponder 
 what course to pursue. On one hand, the path led to supreme honour and 
 unequalled glory. Had not the Psalmist himself spoken of the princes 
 of the earth as subject to the Messiah, and did not the prophet say that 
 the Gentiles should come to His light, and kings to the brightness of His 
 rising, and that the wealth of the world would be brought to Him ? On 
 the other hand, the way led through shame, poverty, neglect, derision, 
 insult, and suffering, in all probahility to an ignominious death. To 
 ordinary minds, the dream of ambition and splendour would have shone 
 with inconceivable attractions against such a background. But it was 
 not left to mere vague suggestions. By that mysterious power which 
 spirit has of acting ujjon spirit, the adversary raised, within the soul of 
 Jesus, a vision the most seductive, to enforce his subtlety. It seemed as 
 if the desert vanished from around Him, and that the tempter and tempted
 
 284 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Oao stood together on a high mountain, from -whose top the kindled fancy 
 ap])eared to see all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. Milton 
 paints the vision with matchless power. Fair rivers, winding through 
 rich pastures and fertile corn-fields ; hnge cities, high towered, the seats 
 of mightiest monarchies ; regions beyond the conquests of Alexander to 
 the east, and far as Eome to the Avest. Did not the prophets say that the 
 rightful Sovereign of all this was God's Messiah ? 
 
 But if so, — the foul suggestion continued, — how was this world-wide 
 empire, in which, as God's Anointed, He might reign in righteousness, 
 blessing the nations, and filling the earth with the knowledge of God, to 
 be gained? Great enterprises need great means. He was unknown, 
 without friends, of humble birth, the son of a carjienter, and bred up in 
 poverty in a Galileean village. Why not put Himself at the head of His 
 nation, which was ready to follow Him if He displayed His glory, and 
 lead them against the heathen, using His Divine poAver to shatter all 
 opposition ? Had not God of old divided the sea a^nd the rivers, to make 
 a path for His people, led by His prophet .P Had He not rebuked kings 
 for their sake ? Had He not promised that the enemies of His Anointed 
 should be made His footstool, and that He Himself would be at His right 
 hand, in the day of His wrath, to make Him reign over the heathen, and 
 smite the people of many lands ? 
 
 It is impossible to conceive a temptation more difficult to resist. Feel- 
 ing that, as the Messiah, He was destined to universal monarchy, and 
 conscious that His rule would be the happiness of the world ; supported, 
 apparently, by the voice of prophets speaking for God, in the use of force 
 to establish this heavenly empire, and Himself instinct with miraculous 
 power which would make resistance vain, it' might seem as if He could 
 hardly resist the suggestion. Judas the Galitean had risen thus a few 
 years before ; and his memory was revered. But Satan spread his subtlest 
 temptations in vain. With the self-restraint becoming a sinless nature, 
 Christ resisted the dazzling vision. Deliberately rejecting the thought 
 of basing His empire on force. He chose, with a lofty grandeur of soul, 
 to found it on the love, rather than on the fears or compelled submission 
 of mankind. Having come, not to destroy men's lives, but to save them, 
 He would use His miraculous power only for good to man and for the 
 gloT-y of His Father, trusting Himself to Him, without other defence or 
 care than His unfailing wisdom and love. The heavenly gifts He held 
 should never be employed to bring merely jiersonal advantage to Himself. 
 As a man. He was, and would remain, meek and lowly; His gifts as 
 Messiah would be used only for spiritual ends. 
 
 Milton, with striking force, has represented Him as saying — • 
 
 "Victorious deeds 
 Flamed iu My heart, heroic acts — one while 
 To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke ; 
 Men to subdue and quell, o'er all the earth, 
 Brute violence and proud tyrannic power, 
 Till trutli were freed, and equity restored : 
 Yet held it more humane, moi'o heavenly, first 
 By winning words to conquer willing hearts, 
 And make persuasion do the work of fear."
 
 THE TEMrTATION. 285 
 
 From first to last, Jesus refused to exercise His supernatural power to 
 establish His kingdom by outward means, and, indeed, it was because of 
 His persistent refusal to do so that His nation rejected Him. Assent to 
 the temptation seemed to Him like an act of homage to the Prince of this 
 Avorld, His adversary, for force and violence are characteristics of his 
 sway. As the Prince of Peace, He would have nothing to do with strife. 
 The temptation lost its power as He uttered the words " Get thee behind 
 Me, Satan, for it is written. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and 
 Him only shalt thou sei've." 
 
 He had now been tempted by hunger and by ambition : there remained 
 another possible opening for the enemy ; through the avenue of spiritual 
 pride. Earthly glory had had no attractions for Him, but He might bo 
 vain of His newly acquired Messiahship, and willing to display His super- 
 natural powers for mere empty effect, and to flatter His own self-love. 
 To disguise the aim, a sacred gloss was at hand. Instead of evil— com- 
 pliance would only show, in another form, that absolute dependence upon 
 God, by which he had repelled the appeal to His natural wants. The arch 
 magician had In-ought before the eye of His mind, perhaps also of His body, 
 the pomp and glory of the world. He had, before, wrought upon the 
 natural desire there is in all men for fame and dignity ; but the vast allu- 
 sion had been treated as an idle show, unworthy of regard. Would a pro- 
 posal, however, to inaugurate His Messiahship by what would justify His 
 utmost claims, be as firmly turned aside ? Jesus was no angel, or mere 
 spirit without human desires. It was of the very essence of His being to 
 be touched and moved by all that influences men at large, and nothing 
 could be more natural than at once to vindicate His rank and authority, 
 and open the Avay for His ministrations, by some startling miracle. No 
 place was so well fitted for such a demonstration as Jerusalem, the holy 
 city, and no spot in it so suitable as the Temple, the centre of the national 
 religion and the chosen dwelling-place of God. Miltou makes Satan bear 
 our Lord 
 
 " Over the wilderness, and o'er the plain ; 
 Till, underneatli tlaoni, fair Jerusalem, 
 The Holy City, lifted bigli Ler lowers, 
 And biglier yet the glorious temple rear'd 
 Her jjile, far off appearing like a mount 
 Of alabaster, topp'd with golden spires : 
 There, on the highest pinnacle, he set 
 The Son of God." 
 
 Some famous spire of the Temple buildings must bo intended, though 
 we are no longer able to explain the allusion. It may be it was some 
 pinnacle of the great three-aisled Eoyal Porch, which ran along the 
 southern side of the Temple area, overlooking the valley of Hinnom, fi-om 
 a dizzy height. Perhaps it was the season of one of the great feasts, when 
 countless pilgrims were gathered in Jerusalem, who would carry the report 
 of any miraculous display throughout the earth. That the suggestion 
 raised in the mind of Jesus to glorify His office, and lighten His great 
 work, by an astounding miracle, might seem natural and specioxTS, is only 
 to suppose Him human ; and that it should take the form of His casting 
 
 3
 
 286 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Himself down from au airy lieiglit, to alight iu the distant valley beneath, 
 might seem no less so. It is not necessary to conceive of a bodily trans- 
 lation to the Temple roof: the true place of temptation is the soul, in 
 ■which all the scenery and accessories of any prospect can be created by 
 the imagination in a moment. To make it more attractive, a text of Scrip- 
 ture was at hand, for had not Grod said, " He shall give His angels charge 
 concerning Thee, and in their hands they shall bear Thee np " ? So 
 Shakespere makes Eichard of Gloucester twist the sacred text — 
 
 " But tlien I sigh, aud witli a piece of Scripture, 
 Tell tbera, that God bids us do good for evil. 
 And thus I clothe my naked villany 
 With old odd ends, stolen forth of Holy Writ j 
 And seem a saint when most I play the devil." 
 
 Bassanio's words never had a more fitting application — • 
 
 " In religion 
 What damned error, but sonae_ sober brow- 
 Will bless it, and approve it with a test, 
 Hiding the grossness with fair ornament ? " 
 
 But whatever hope the great enemy may have had in this last attempt was 
 vain. To the perfect humility of Jesus, any idea of display or ostentation 
 had no charms ; nor could He, who would rather bear the extreme of hunger 
 than seem to distrust His Heavenly Father, by using miraculous power in 
 His own behalf, be for a moment tempted to employ it for any mere personal 
 honour. Nor, moreover, would He dream of claiming supernatural aid 
 from God for that which had not the sanction of His command. His pro- 
 mise of protection vouchsafed aid only when the danger to be averted rose 
 in the discharge of prescribed duty. The appeal to spiritual pride or 
 vanity fell as harmlessly as tlie temptations already foiled. It had been 
 whispered to the soul of Jesus, as the vision rose before Him—" Go and 
 cast Thyself down : is it not written that the augels shall bear Thee up " ? 
 But one brief sentence turned the wizard gold to dross — " Thou shalt not 
 tempt the Lord thy God." 
 
 Mysterious in some aspects, the wilderness retirement of our Lord, with 
 its fires of temptation, putting Him to the utmost proof, becomes an in- 
 evitable passage in His life, when we think of Him as a man like ourselves, 
 though sinless. His soul could reveal its beauty only by victory in a life- 
 long struggle with temptation, such as happens to us all. Nor can we 
 think of a Messiah, who should draw all men to Him as the ideal of 
 humanity, treading any other jaath than that allotted to His brethren. It 
 is a vital error, therefore, to represent these temptations as mere outward 
 pictures of the imagination, playing before Him, or as mere emotions 
 of pleasure or aversion which left His will nnassailed, and Vt'ere dissipated 
 or quenched in a moment, on their rising. It is no less so to regard them 
 as mere illusions of the senses, passing like clouds over His mind, and 
 leaving His inner being wholly undisturbed. 
 
 If there had been no more than this, there could have been no struggle, 
 no pause and agony of soul — that is, no real temptation. The Gospels 
 know nothing of such an unreal probation. They show us temptations 
 throughout, plying His will, and seeking to paralyze it, even to the length
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE RtTL'EX TKOM THE AVILDERXESS. 
 
 rn HE seclusion of Jesus in the desert bad been tbe turning point in His 
 -L life. "Wbcn He left L^azaretb to visit Jobn, Ho was a bumble 
 Galilsean villager. He returned, the consecrated Messiah, no longer 
 oppressed by the responsibilities and difficulties of His great office, but 
 ready to come before Israel as the Lamlj of God, who should take away the 
 sins of the world. 
 
 I 
 
 THE IlETUEN EEOM THE WILDERNESS. 287 
 
 of sug2:estinG; a withdrawal from His work as the Messiah. "What else can 
 have caused His prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, 
 or the touching outburst, " Xow is My soul troubled ; and what shall I 
 say ? Father, save Me from this hour : but for this cause came I unto 
 this hour." He was proved and tried, from His j^outh to Gethsemane, and, / 
 like us, might have yielded, though, in fact, offering a transcendent con- 
 trast in His unbroken victory over all temptation. 
 
 The episode in the wilderness was, indeed, more subtle in its seductions 
 than is needed for grosser natures like ours. He had to repel, as evil, what 
 to others might have seemed the ideal of good. It was no irresolution, 
 from pride, or vanity, or fear, that troubled Him : His soul was oppressed 
 by the greatness of His Divine office : His lowly humility was like to sink 
 under its l)nrdeu. With us, an act is held sinful, only when it is distinctly 
 prohibited, and at every step we hesitate to reject where there seems room 
 to doubt. With Jesus there was no such waving line of compromise. To 
 deviate from the direct command of God, for any end, however holy, was, 
 to Him, a sin. The contrast of Divine and human, or Satanic, rose before 
 Him with such a clear decision, that the least divergence from the express 
 letter of His Father's will was instantly rejected. He turned away from 
 what the noblest souls before Him had cherished as holy visions, as from 
 temptations of the Prince of Darkness. He not only triumphed, but 
 showed, in His perfect obedience to His Heavenly Father, an image of the 
 ideal and stainless holiness required from us all. 
 
 This Divine purity, inflexible, unswerving, moving ever directly for- 
 ward, acknowledging only The Eight, — rejecting all else ; and finding 
 peace only in complete, loving submission to the will of God, rests with 
 uniciue glory over all the life of Jesus, but especially over His temptation 
 in the desert. It gives the sujireme beauty to His life, and was its 
 strength and power. There could be no hesitation where all was thus sim- 
 plified : where only God, or the- world and the devil, beckoned onAvards. 
 
 Through life, as in the wilderness. His choice was instinctive and instan- 
 taneous, between God and sin. Good and evil were to Him, light and 
 darkness, and it was vain to tempt Him even to approach the cloudy, 
 doubtful, dividing line. The desert had served its purpose. The crisis 
 had passed. Yielding Himself into the hands of God, His spiritual 
 struggle was exchanged for the joys of angel ministration.
 
 288 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Can we picture to ourselves tlie pcrsoual appearance of the Saviour at 
 this momentous point in His career ? We know that He was still in the 
 glory of early manhood, but can we realize Him more closely ? 
 
 It is fatal to the hope of a reliable portrait, that the Jewish horror of 
 images as idolatrous, extended to the likeness of the human face or form. 
 No hint of Christ's appearance is given in the New Testament ; and the 
 early Church, in the absence of all guiding facts, had to fall back on 
 imagination. Itself sorely oppressed, it naturally pictured its Founder 
 through the medium of its own despondency. Had He been an illustrious 
 Romaji or Greek, the Grecian love of beauty would, doubtless, have created 
 an ideal of faultless perfection; but in its first, dark years, the sorely-tried 
 Church fancied their Lord's visage and form as " marred more than those 
 of other men," and that He must have had no attractions of personal 
 beauty. Justin Martyr speaks of Him as without beauty or attractiveness, 
 and of mean appearance. Clement of Alexandria describes Him as of an 
 uninviting appearance, and almost repulsive. Tertullian says He had not 
 even ordinary human beauty, far less heavenly. Origen went so far as to 
 say that He was " small in body and deformed, as well as low-born," and 
 that " His only beauty was in His soul and life." About the same time, 
 however, the Christian Gnostics, who had not such an antipathy to heathen 
 art, began to make likenesses of Him of another type, in paintings, gems, 
 or metal, and small statues of Him, which they crowned and honoured in 
 the heathen fashion. The features were said to have been copied from a 
 portrait, fancifully thought to have been taken by order of Pilate. The ideal, 
 however, prevailed more and more, for the half-heathen sects who used 
 these likenesses had the Greek feeling that the gods must needs be divinely 
 beautiful. In the third century the conception thus invented found its 
 way into the private chapel of the emperor Severus, by the side of illus- 
 trious kings and emperors, and of " the holy souls," of Abraham, Orpheus, 
 Apollonius, and other worthies. It is possible that degrading caricatures 
 of Jesus, which had become common among the heathen, led to this nobler 
 conception of His beauty. 
 
 The triumph of Christianity over heathenism found a partial revenge in 
 the footing gained in the Church for a more kindly estimate of what had 
 now lost its religious power. The first Christian art bearing on Jesus — 
 that of the catacombs — Avas, however, jiurely symbolicaL The figure of a 
 fish stood for His name, from the significance of the letters in the Greek 
 word for one of the finny race, or He was re]3resented by the symbol of a 
 lamb, or of a shepherd. After a time, the further ideal of a teacher of 
 mankind was added, and, gradually, in the fourth century. He was pictured 
 as a child, after which it was an easy step to portray Him on the Cross. 
 With the general introduction of such likenesses, the idea of any repulsive 
 appearance was necessarily irreconcilable. Eusebius, of Ctesarea, describes 
 a statue which he himself saw at Pauias, or Csesarea Philippi, the reputed 
 birthplace and residence of the woman who was healed of the issue of 
 blood. " At the gates of her house," says he, " on a raised pedestal, stands 
 a brazen image of a woman on her bended knee, with her hands stretched 
 out before her like one enti-eating. Opposite her is an image of a mau
 
 THE RETURN FROM THE WILDERNESS. 289 
 
 erect, of the same materials, in a full pallium, stretching out his hand to 
 the woman." " Before her feet," he adds, " and on the same pedestal, a 
 strange kind of plant grows, which rises as high as the hem of the brazen 
 garment, and is an antidote to all kinds of diseases. This statue, they say, 
 is a statue of Jesus Christ." Unfortunately, the credulity which believed 
 in the miraculous plant is a poor guarantee for the worth of a vague, 
 popular fancy as to the statue. It was, doubtless, a relic of Grecian art, 
 transformed by a fond reverence into a memorial of Jesus. There can be 
 no doubt, however, that paintings, claiming to be actual resemblances of 
 our Lord, of Peter, and of Paul, were to be found in the time of Euscbius, 
 for he says that he himself had seen them, and thought them old thanks- 
 memorials of devout heathen who had reverenced Christ and honoured 
 Him in this way, as they were accustomed to honour their own gods. 
 
 The old conception of the appearance of Jesus, borrowed from the words 
 of Isaiah, had now finally given place to one which exalted His beauty to 
 the utmost, as the natural outward expression of the Divine purity and 
 perfection of His inner being. Gregory of Nyssa applies the imagery of 
 the Song of Solomon to His person, no less than to His doctrine. Jerome 
 embodies in his words the glorious ideal which Christian art was after- 
 wards to develop, basing the thought of Him no longer on the description 
 of the suffering " servant of God," in Isaiah, but on the words of the forty- 
 fifth Psalm— " Thou art fairer than the children of men." "Assuredly," 
 says he, " that splendour and majesty of the hidden Divinity, which shone 
 even in His human countenance, could not but attract, at first sight, all 
 beholders. Unless He had had something heavenly in His appearance, 
 the Apostles would not immediately have followed Him." Chrysostom 
 tells us that " the Heavenly Father poured out on Him, in full streams, 
 that personal beauty which is distilled only drop by drop upon mortal 
 man ; " and Augustine, with his wonted vigorous eloquence, says that 
 " He was beautiful in His mother's bosom, beautiful in the arms of His 
 parents, beautiful on the cross, and beautiful in the sepulchre." But that 
 this glowing language was only metaphor is beyond dispute, from the 
 words of Augustine himself. " Of His a^ipearance," says he, " we are 
 wholly ignorant, for the likenesses of Him vary entirely, according to the 
 fancy of the artist." Different races had already created distinct and 
 different ideals, in harmony with their local standards of perfection. The 
 old conception of His being without form or beauty did not, however, at 
 once lose its power. St. Basil clung to it strenuously, and the monks of 
 his order are said to have reproduced it in paintings so late as the eighth 
 century. The austere Cyril of Alexandria went so far as to maintain that 
 He was " mean in appearance beyond all the sons of men," a proof, in its 
 very contrast with the then prevailing conception, that there was no 
 historical portrait to which to appeal, nor even a traditional ideal respect- 
 ing our Lord's appearance. 
 
 Images of Clmst met at first with earnest opposition, partly because ib 
 seemed impossible adequately to rein^esent the glorified Saviour in human 
 form, and partly, no doubt, because heretic sects were the first to introduce 
 them. Cyril of Alexandria is credited with having brought them into the 
 
 u
 
 290 THE LIFE OE CHRIST. 
 
 service of the Cliui'cli. Once in some measure sanctioned, their nsc, 
 especially in the East, spread far and wide, and legends were invented to 
 sup]:)ort their authenticity as likenesses of the Saviour. John of Damascus, 
 in his fiery zeal in the great controversy on the use of images, sought to 
 paralyze the opposition of the iconoclast emperor Oonstantine Ooprouymus, 
 by bringing forward a legend, vrhich we first meet at the close of the fifth 
 century, that Abgarus, king of Edessa, had once sent a painter to Jesus 
 to take His portrait, but the artist failed, from the dazzling brightness of 
 the Saviour's features. Jesus, the legend went on to say, honouring the 
 spirit that had prompted the attempt, impressed His likeness on the cloth 
 with which He was wont to wipe His brow, and sent it to Abgarus. But 
 though a letter of Abgarus to Jesus, and of Jesus to Abgarus, are noticed 
 by Justin Martyr, as early as the middle of the second centux-y, this 
 wondrous story of the miraculous portrait appears only as an addition of 
 centuries later. 
 
 ISTot to be outdone, the Western Church created its own version of this 
 wondi'ous legend in that of Veronica, a fabled saint of Jerusalem, who, 
 seeing Jesus pass on His way to Calvary, His face streaming with the 
 blood of the crown of thorns, unwound the cloth of her turban and gave 
 it Him that He might wipe His brow. In returji, it is said, the loving 
 disciple received, on the cloth, an imprinted likeness of her Lord, not 
 calm and peaceful, however, like that of Edessa, but saddened by pain and 
 sorrow. A third miraculous likeness, embracing Christ's whole body, was 
 averred to have been left on the linen in which He was wrajiped in the 
 sepulchre, and it was said that this passed into the possession of Nico- 
 demus, and then to the Christians of Jerusalem, from whom, after passing 
 through wonderful fortunes, it was brought at last, in the year 1.578, to 
 Turin, Avhere it now is. Yeronica's cloth is now in St. Peter's, at Home, 
 though Milan, in northern Italy, and Jaen, in Spain, both boast that they 
 have the authentic relic. 
 
 The earliest images of Christ, as has been said, were those introduced 
 among the Gnostics, and of these, two, at least, with some claim to authen- 
 ticity, are still extant. Like the images of Pj'thagoras, Plato, Aristotle, 
 and other sages, which these strange sects consecrated along with that 
 of the Saviour, they are small, and rather medallions than busts. The 
 one is of stone, with a head of Christ, young and beardless, in profile — the 
 name xp'crros (Christos) in Cxreek characters, and the symbolical fish, below. 
 "J'he other is a kind of medal, representing Christ with His hair parted 
 over His forehead, covering the cars, and falling do-^vn on the shoulders. 
 It has the name of Jesus, in Hebrew, below it. Perhaps it was the work 
 of some Jewish Christian. In the fifteenth century, the historian Nice- 
 phorus ventm-ed on a fuller sketch of the person of Christ than had been 
 previously given, and it may be well to quote it, if only to re]n'oduce the 
 conception formed by the Church of the Middle Ages. " I shall describe," 
 says Nicephorus, " the appearance of our Lord, as handed down to us from 
 auticpiity. He Vv^as veiy beautiful. His height was fully seven spans ; 
 His hair was bright auburn, and not too thick, and it was inclined to wave 
 iu soft curls. His eyebrows were black and arched, and His eyes seemed
 
 THE EETURN PEOSI THE WILDERNESS. 291 
 
 to shed from them a geutle golden light. They were very beautifuL His 
 nose was prominent ; His beard lovely, but not very long. He wore His 
 hail', on the contrary, very long, for no scissors had ever touched it, nor 
 any human hand, except that of His mother when she played with it in 
 His childhood. He stooped a little, but His body was well formed. His 
 complexion was that of the ripe bro^^oi wheat, and His face, like that of 
 His mother, rather oval than round, with only a little red in it, but through 
 it there shone dignity, intelligence of soul, gentleness, and a calmness of 
 spirit never disturbed. Altogether, He was very like His divine and 
 immaculate mother." 
 
 What the imaginary description of Christ by Nicephovus has been in 
 the Eastern Church, that of the fictitious letter of Lentulus to the Eomau 
 Senate has been to the Western. It first appeared at the close of the 
 fifteenth century, when the works of Anselm were collected and printed, 
 and is the forgery of some monk who sought a good end by one of the 
 pious frauds then very widely in favour. The internal evidence alone 
 shows that it is a mere fabrication, and as even ISTicephorus makes no 
 allusion to it, its date may safely be assumed as later than his lifetime. 
 "There has appeared," says Lentulus, "and still lives, a man of great 
 virtue, called Jesus Christ, and, by His disciples, the Son of God. He 
 raises the dead, and heals the sick. He is a man tall in stature, noble in 
 appearance, with a reverend countenance, which at once attracts and keeps 
 at a distance those beholding it. His hair is waving and curly; a little 
 darker and of richer brightness, where it flows down from the shoulders. 
 It is divided in the middle, after the custom of the ISTazareues (or ISTazarites). 
 His brow is smooth, and wondrously serene, and His features have no 
 wrinkles, nor any blemish, while a red glow makes His cheeks beautiful. 
 His nose and mouth are perfect. He has a full ruddy beard the colour 
 of His hair ; not long, but divided into two. His eyes are bright, and 
 seem of different colours at different times. He is terrible in His threat- 
 enings; calm in His admonitions; loving and loved; and cheerful, but 
 with an abiding gravity. Is^o one ever saw Him smile, but He often w^eeps. 
 His hands and iiml:)s are perfect. He is gravely eloquent, retiring, and 
 modest, the fairest of the sons of men." 
 
 It may be interesting to add to these older ideals that of a writer of the 
 present day. " Onr eyes were restlessly attracted to Him," says Delitzsch, 
 in one of his beautiful stories, " for He was the centre of the group. He 
 was not in soft clothing of byssus and silk, like the courtiers of Tiberias 
 or Jerusalem, nor did He wear long trailing robes, like some of the 
 Pharisees, On His head was a white kefSyeh— a square of linen doubled 
 so that a corner fell down on each shoulder, and on the back; a fillet or 
 aghul round the head, keeping it in its place. On His body He wore a 
 tunic which reached to His wrists and to His feet, and over this a blue 
 tallith, with the prescribed tassels of blue and white at the four corners, 
 hung down so that the under garment, which was grey striped with red, 
 was little seen. His feet shod with sandals, not shoes, were only visible 
 now and then, as He walked or moved." 
 
 " He was a man of middle size ; beautiful as a youth in His face and
 
 292 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 form. The purity and charm of early manhood blended in His connte- 
 nance with the rij^eness of mature years. His complexion was fairer than 
 that of those around Him, for it shoAved less of the bronze colour of the 
 nation. He seemed, indeed, even pale, under the white sudar, for the 
 ruddy glow of health, iisual at His years, was wanting. The type of His 
 features was hardly Jevvish, but rather as if that and the Greek types 
 blended into a perfect beauty, which, while it awakened reverence, filled 
 the heart, still more, with love. His eyes looked on you with light which 
 seemed broken and softened, as if Ijy passing through tears. He stooped 
 a little, and seemed communing with His own thoughts, and when He 
 moved, there was no affectation, as with some of the Eabbis, but a natural 
 dignity and grace, like one who feels himself a king, though dressed in 
 lowly robes." 
 
 We owe our knowledge of the period immediately following the Tempta- 
 tion to the narrative of the fourth Gospel, written after the others. In 
 the other Gospels, the splendour of the later ministry in Galilee seems to 
 have overshadowed the humbler beginuings of the earlier period, so that 
 they are almost passed over by them. Happily, however, John pre- 
 serves for us, in comparative detail, tlie incidents of these silent months, 
 in which the public life of Jesus was slowly opening into full flower. How 
 much would have been lost had his record not been given ? There is a 
 peculiar charm in the glimpses they supply of the early spring-time of the 
 Saviour's ministry ; a tender fragrance all their own. 
 
 The first great crisis of His life being over, with its forty days of tempta- 
 tion and proof, its long fasting, its great victor}^, and its ministrations of 
 angels, Jesus returned to the Jordan, and mingled, unnoticed and unknown, 
 in the crowd round the Baptist. It was appai'ently the early spring; at 
 least, a fine tradition of the primitive Church would have it so, perhaps to 
 link together the opening spiritual year with the beauty of the reviving 
 year of natui-e. He may have held communion once and again with John, 
 but He lived apart from him, silently passing to and fro among the mul- 
 titudes. Only the day before His arrival, John had renewed his homage 
 to Him in His absence, before a deputation from the ecclesiastical authori- 
 ties of the Temple, sent to investigate his own teaching and authority. 
 " Was he the Christ ? or Elijah ? or the expected prophet, Isaiah, Jere- 
 miah, or some other?" The nobly humble man, tliough at the height of 
 his glory, with the nation looking up to him, in reverence, as a prophet, 
 had no thought of hesitation in his answer. Jesus was unknown, but John 
 yields Him the first place, and proclaims himself unworthy to perform the 
 lowliest offices for One so exalted. " I am only he of whom Isaiah speaks, 
 as a voice crying in the wilderness, ' Make straight the Avay of the Lord.' 
 I only baptize with water, but there stands among you One whom ye know 
 not — He who is to come after me : I am not worthy to kneel before Him 
 to loose the thong of His sandal." The symbol of servitude and subjec- 
 tion offered by a slave to a new master was to untie his shoe and bind it 
 again, but even this was too great an honour, in John's opinion, for him to 
 be permitted to pay to Christ. 
 
 The Baptist had often borne similar testimony, liftiug np his voice and
 
 THE RETURN FROM THE WILDERNESS. 293 
 
 crying aloud to tlie people to prepare for the speedy manifestation of the 
 Great Expected One, — bnt, now, ho was able to liear witness to Him in 
 His presence. As he was staudhig the next daj^ among his followers, 
 Jesus Himself apjn'oached, doubtless to speak Avitli him on the affairs of 
 the kingdom of God, in which both were so entirely engrossed. He was 
 still unknown, unrecognised, and imnoticed, and He would not reveal Him- 
 self by any act of self-assertion on His own part. But the very end of 
 John's mission was that the Christ should " be made manifest to Israel," 
 and the hour had now come to draw aside the veil. Pointing to Him, 
 therefore, while yet at a distance, he proclaimed His glory in words which 
 must have thrilled those who heartl them : " Behold the Lamb of God, who 
 takes away the sin of the world. This is He of v/hom I said, ' After me 
 comes a Man who is preferred before me, for He was before me.' And I 
 knew Him not (as the Messiah) ; but that He should be made manifest to 
 Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water. I have seen the Spirit 
 descending as a dove out of heaven, and it abode upon Him. And I knew 
 Him not (as the Messiah) ; but He that sent me to baptize with water, the 
 same said unto me, ' Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and 
 remaining on Him, He it is who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.' And I 
 have seen and borne witness that this is the Son of God." 
 
 It is possible, as Milman suggests, that flocks of lambs, intended for the 
 Temple sacrifices, then passing from the rich pastures of Perea to the ford 
 beside which John was baptizing, may have suggested the name " Lamb 
 of God," }jy which he consecrated to the Church, for ever, that most 
 cherished symbol of the Redeemer. Jesus was meek and gentle like the 
 lamb, but there was much more in the use of such a name by the son of a 
 priest — a Nazarite and a prophet, like John. The idea of sacrifice was 
 natural and inevitable to him, in connection with it. The nation, indeed, 
 in Christ's day, had so little idea of a suffering and dying Messiah, that 
 Jonathan Ben Uzziel, the contemjjorary of Christ, while he sees the Mes- 
 siah in the " Servant of God," of Isaiah's jDrophecies, ingeniously explains 
 His sufferings as meaning those of Israel. But the number of passages 
 which spoke of the Messiah as suffering, even then arrested attention, and 
 raised a difficulty which the Rabbis of a later day ti'ied to solve by assum- 
 ing that tliere would be two Messiahs — one, the son of Joseph, who should 
 suffer and die ; the other, the son of David, who should live and reign. 
 Even then, the Rabbis saw in the words of Zechai'iah, "They shall look on 
 Him whom they have pierced," and in the words of Isaiah, in his fifty- 
 third chapter, a reference to the Messiah, and, hence, the Jew, in Justin's 
 dialogue, written about a hundred years after Christ, saw nothing sur- 
 prising in the idea of the Messiah suffering, though he revolted from the 
 thought of His dying in a way cursed by the Law, like crucifixion, a difli- 
 culty met with by St. Paul himself. 
 
 John, who had studied Isaiah so deeply, and was so penetrated by his 
 spirit, could not have overlooked those verses which speak of the " Sei'vant 
 of God," as " brought like a lamb to the slaughter," and as " bearing the 
 iniquities of many," and " making intercession for the transgressors," nor 
 the words of Zechariah, which even the Rabbis referred to the Messiah.
 
 294 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 But Ms langnage, after the return of Jesus from the wilderness, shows a 
 striking contrast to his previous tone. Before that, he spoke of the 
 Messiah only as having the fan in His hand, and as laying the axe at tlie 
 root of the tree, and baptizing with fire as well as the Spirit. Now, he 
 sees in Him the meek, spotless, and patient Lamb, destined l)y God to 
 sacrifice. That He was to " take away the sin of the world," leaves no 
 question as to the sense in which John saw in Him the " Lamb of God." 
 Isaiah had painted " the Servant of God " as making peace for the people, 
 by His vicarious sufferings for them, and this " Servant " John sees in 
 Jesus. Fitly typified Ijy " the Lamb," from His gentle patience. He is still 
 more so, as the Antitype of Old Testament sacrifice. To exclude the idea 
 of expiatory suffering, is to trifle with the words of the Baptist, and the 
 ingenious fancy that finds an allusion to the pastoral imagery of the 
 twenty-third Psalm, is even more arbitrary. John saw in Jesus the pro- 
 pitiation, which was, even then, bearing and carrying away the sin of the 
 world. 
 
 How was it that Jolm realized so much more clearly than any around 
 him the true ideal of the Messiah, as the sacrificial Lamb, appointed of 
 God, on whom had been laid the sins of a guilty woidd? It can be 
 explained only by remembering that his very mission was to reveal Him 
 to the world. For this, he tells us, he had been sent, and his commission, 
 therefore, implied a disclosure to him, not only of the person, but the true 
 work of the Messiah. We know that revelation from above pointed out 
 Jesus to him by a heavenly sign, and, from the same source, we may 
 assume, he learned the groat truth that, as the Messiah, He would expiate 
 the sin of the world by His sufferings. It may be that Jesus Himself 
 talked with him of " His decease, which he should accomplish at Jeru- 
 salem." But this, itself, would be a revelation. Only, however, by com- 
 munication from a higher source, could the idea have been formed of a 
 suffering Messiah — an idea so alien to the conceptions of the day, though 
 dimly realized by individuals like the aged Simeon, or Zacharias, to whom 
 a proiihetic insight had been, for the moment, given. " We have heard 
 out of the Law," said the people to Jesus Himself, " that the Christ 
 abideth for ever" — that is, should never die— "and how sayest Thou, ' The 
 Son of Man must bo lifted up ? ' Who is this son of Man ? " It was in 
 the face of such a universal contrast of thought, that John announced the 
 great truth, with clear and precise distinctness, noting even its having 
 already begun, and its future world-embracing greatness. The more 
 strange the idea of a suffering Messiah might be to the nation ; the more 
 difficult it proved to bring it home even to the disciples themselves ; the 
 more it needed to be slowly developed by the facts of Christ's life and 
 death, to secure its being understood ; — so much the more justified is the 
 l)clief in a special revelation throwing light into the Baptist's soul, on the 
 full meaning of ancient prophecy. 
 
 It must not be thought, however, that, with all these heavenly revel- 
 ations, the knowledge of John was as minute and definite as that of those 
 whose minds the teachings of Jesus afterwards illuminated from above, 
 A generation later, some disciples of John, living at Ephesus, when asked
 
 THE EETUEN Fr.OM THE WILDERNESS. 295 
 
 by Paul, " If they bad received the Holy Ghost since thej^ believed ? " 
 answered that thej' had not so much as heard of there being any Holy 
 Ghost at all. The Jews of John's day thought of the Holy Spirit only 
 vaguely, as the " Spirit of Jehovah" — the effluence of the Divine power 
 and grace, and we owe it to the Gospels and the Epistles that we now 
 liave clearer concejitions. 
 
 John had pointed to Jesus as " the Lamb of God," and had thus, doubt- 
 less, fixed the attention of those around on one associated with a symbol 
 so sacred and tender. But lie did not confine himself to a title not yet 
 familiar, as addressed to the Messiah, and added another which had already 
 been appropriated to Him in the literature of the nation — " I saw, and 
 bare record that this is the Son of^ God." The Sibylline verses, the Book 
 of Enoch, and the Fourth Book of Esdras, had, for generations, applied 
 this title to the expected Messiah, and, thus, there could be no misappre- 
 hension in the mind of any who heard it given to Jesus. It was His 
 formal proclamation by the appointed herald. 
 
 It scorned as if this wondrous testimony liad been lost on those who 
 heard it; but though the multitude took little hoed of it, thei'o were some 
 hearts in which it found a woi'thy response. The nest day, as John was 
 f-tanding with two of his disciples, Jesus again passed, and was proclaimed 
 anew in the same words. Fixing his eyes earnestly on Him, John called 
 on his companions to " behold the Lamb of God." It was enough. Thcj' 
 might not realize the full import of the name, but they felt the Divine 
 attractiveness of Him to whom it was given. AVaiting with anxious hearts 
 for the Messiah, they no sooner heard John proclaim that Jesus was He, 
 than they forthwith left the Baptist, to follow Him whom he thus 
 honoured. 
 
 Jesus, Himself, now about to begin His j^ublic ministry, was ready to 
 receive disciples. He had jDermanently abandoned His obscure life of 
 Nazareth, and was, henceforth, to be a Eabbi in Israel. 
 
 The teachers of the day were surrounded by an inner circle of disciples, 
 able, in some measure, in the absence of their masters, to represent them 
 in public, by speaking in the synagogues, answering ciuestions, or under- 
 taking missionary journej's, and these were to be the duties of the dis- 
 ciples of Jesus. They were to be trained by Him in the mysteries of the 
 Kingdom, as those of t-lie Eabbis were in the mysteries of the Law. No 
 teacher assumed his office in Israel without a group of such followers, for 
 it was reckoned a grave sin for a Eabbi to be at any time without some 
 one to instruct in the LaAv, and even their scholars were required to 
 converse hal)itually on this one study of their lives. " "Wlien two scholars 
 of the wise," says the Talnmd, "are making a journey together, and do not 
 make the Law the subject of their conversation, they deserve to be 
 biirned alive, as is wi'itten in 2 Kings ii. 11." It was, therefore, only an 
 adoption of the custom of the day which Jesus now followed. 
 
 The two who now joined Him seem to have hitherto formed part of such 
 an inner circle round John, and were the beginning of a group of trusted 
 friends, with whom Jesus could associate, and of auxiliaries in His great 
 work, while, also, a nucleus round which otliers might gather. He drew
 
 296 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 them to Him, however, iu a way new and significant, for He did not wait 
 till they asked leave to attend Him, and did not court their aid, l)ut called 
 on them to follow Him ; retaining, thus, a relation of superiority even in 
 this detail. 
 
 He could, hence, more freely admit them to the most endearing and 
 familiar intimacy ; and speak of them, before long, as His friends, His 
 brethren, and even His children and little ones, though, also. His servants. 
 He had chosen them, not they Him ; and thus He could the better train 
 them to be teachers in His New Society, alluring the world to it by the 
 example of their lives, or spreading it by their ministrations. Standing 
 towards them iu a relation so dignified, they were at once His companions, 
 and the ageuts whom He could employ as diligent fishers of men, and 
 labourers in the great vineyard of the kingdom of God. 
 
 Though, like the Eabbis, a teacher of the nation, iu the streets, in the 
 houses, and iu the synagogues, as the custom of the day required, Jesus 
 did not try to gain His immediate followers f j'om that order, or from their 
 disciples, for He had little sympathy with them. He rather sought simple 
 children of the people, free, as far as possible, from prejudice and self- 
 sufiiciency, and marked only by their sincerity, humility, intellectual 
 shrewdness, and religious sensibility. The less they knew of the schools, 
 the less they would have to unlearn ; the more they derived from Him, 
 the more undoubting their loyalty to Him. He found the class He wanted, 
 mostly in lowly fisherman aud peasants. 
 
 Of the first two discijjles, the one was Andrew, a fisherman, from 
 Bethsaida, on the Lake of Galilee ; the other, doubtless, was John himself, 
 a native of the same town — though, with his wonted modesty, he with- 
 holds his name. 'No wonder he remembered every incident of his intro- 
 duction to Christ so minutely, after many years, for it was the birth-hour 
 of his religious life. Very probably the proposal to join the new teacher 
 came from him, and, if so, he was the first to follow Jesus, as he was the 
 last to leave Him. The two had heard Him announced as the Lamb of 
 God, and as such they sought Him. Can we wonder that the name be- 
 came such a favom-ite with one, who, hereafter, was the beloved disciple, 
 that we find it in his writings alone, or that he repeats it in the Apocalypse 
 more than thirty times ? 
 
 The two followed Jesus, anxious to speak to Him, but in modest difficulty 
 how to approach Him. Their embarrassment, however, was brief, for 
 Jesus, hearing their footsteps behind Him, and judging, with the quick 
 instinct of sympathy, that He was being sought for the first time, turned 
 and spoke to them. Asking them what they seek. He is answered in their 
 confusion, by the counter-question,—" Eabbi, where dwellest Thou ? " 
 The multitudes attending such gatherings as John's preaching, were wont 
 to run up temporary booths of wattled boughs, with a striped abba, or 
 outer cloak, thrown over, for cover, and some one had given Jesus a share 
 in such a shelter, for it is not likely that there were houses near. Eabbis 
 Oil their journeys were always welcome to hospitality, and He was already 
 regarded as one, by at least a few. The title had been given even to John, 
 as it now was to Jesus, for although the authorities at Jerusalem dis-
 
 THE RETURN FROM THE WILDERNESS. 297 
 
 countenanced those who had not studied in the schools, and the people half 
 distrusted any teaching which did not address them with that sanction, 
 the recognition was never withheld where evident knowledge of the Law, 
 or worthiness to teach, was seen. Jewish traders and Galilajan teachers, 
 who had no diploma from the schools of Jerusalem, were accepted as 
 Eahbis in Rome ; and in Palestine, the dignity and wisdom of Jesus drew 
 forth towards Him the title of Eabbi and Teacher, not only from the 
 people and the disciples, but even from the Pharisees and Eabbis them- 
 selves. 
 
 The simple words of invitation, " Come and see," were enough to open 
 the relationship between Jesus and hearts so eager to know more of Him, 
 and, presently, they were witli Him, where He dwelt. The day passed 
 Cjuickly, for they did not mark the hours, as time stretched on from noon, 
 when they had come, till towards night. His discourse. His teaching, and 
 His whole Being, excluded all other thoughts. If any doubt respecting 
 Him had remained, it soon passed away. Both were, henceforth. His 
 followers, and both equally recognised in Him the promised Messiah. The 
 night approached, but neither was willing to leave. They had found rest 
 to their souls. All day long, and into the quiet watches of the night, they 
 had listened to His first oioening of His great message of mercy from the 
 Father, and they would fain hear still more. But, as Jeremy Taylor puts 
 it—" in accidents of the greatest pleasure, our joys cannot be contained 
 within the limits of the possessor's thoughts." Andrew had a brother, 
 Simon, and longed to bring him to Jesus. Retiring, therefore, for a time, 
 he soon returned with him in company. It was a matter of the gravest 
 moment, on the one side, that a right choice of disciples should Ijo made, 
 and it was no less momentous on the other, that there should be no self- 
 deception ; but on neither side was there long hesitation, or cautious 
 inc{uiry, or demand for evidence of character, or ci-afty wariness. Every- 
 thing was simple and direct, in all the fulness of mutual confidence and 
 trust. To see Jesus, and hear Him speak, was enough, and He, on His 
 part, " needed not that any should testify of man : for He knew what was 
 in man." Looking steadfastly at Simon, He saw in him, as in John and 
 Andrew, the characteristics He required in His followers. The rare un- 
 bending firmness of purpose, the tenacious fidelity, the swift decisiveness, 
 the Galila^an fire and manliness, and the tender religiousness of spirit, 
 which marked him. to the end of his life, were read at once. Jesus had 
 found in him His firmest, most rock-like servant and confessor ; the man 
 Avho, from this first moment — except for one sad instant — amidst all 
 changes and trials, and the ever-growing storms of the woi'ld, would never 
 be untrue to Him. " Thou art Simon," said He, " the son of Jonas. 
 Henceforth thou shalt be called ' The Rock.' " ISTo wonder that he is best 
 known as Cephas, or Peter, the Aramaic and Greek equivalents of this 
 honourable distinction. The Christian Church was already founded in 
 these three disciples. 
 
 With the fine modesty of his nature, John says nothing of himself in 
 relation to a day so eventful in his history. The kingly soul of Jesus 
 evidently enchained him at once. Henceforth, he was altogether His,
 
 298 THE LIFE 
 
 tliougli, for a time, dismissed to his home. But, once more permitted to 
 follow Ilim, ho is ever found at His side, forgetting himself in his love 
 for his Master, and lost in the contemjjlation of His life and words. We 
 do not know the stages by which, from this moment onwards, his faith in 
 the Saviour grew, till it reached that hleiiding of soul with soul, in inmost 
 love, which made him, to the end of his long life, the ideal disciple. 
 Writing last of all, he allows himself to be seen only twice in the story of 
 his Master— now, when he came with Andrew, as the first to join Christ, 
 and at the close, on Calvary, when he lifts the veil for a moment from the 
 unique relation in which he stood to his Lord. 
 
 The earliest traditions join his brother James with John, as one of the 
 very first disciples, for though John, from the same delicacy as shrank 
 from speaking of himself, does not mention his brother's name, the other 
 three Gospels always number him with the earliest adherents of Jesus. 
 There can be little question that, as Andrew went to seek his brother 
 Simon, John also brought James to Jesus. The intimation that Andrew 
 went first on his errand of love, seems to leave us to infer that he himself 
 went next. 
 
 The four disciples had it in common that they belonged to the same 
 town, Bethsaida, that they were of the fisher population, and that both 
 families were in a comparatively prosperous position. We know nothing 
 of the father of Andrew and Simon, but James and John were the sons of 
 one Zabdai, and we know, from comparison of texts, that their mother was 
 Salome, so honourably mentioned in the Gospels. Writers so acute as 
 Ewald have seen in her a sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and, if so, 
 John and James were cousins of their Master. If it be correct to honour 
 Salome thus, she was present with- Mary at the crucifixion. In any case, 
 she belonged to the number of pious souls ready to accept a spiritual 
 Messiah, and hence her sons must have received the priceless blessing of 
 a godly training and example. It seems as if we could almost trace the 
 beloved disciple in the character of a mother, who " ministered to Jesus 
 of her sidjstance " while He lived, and did not forsake Him even wlien He 
 hung on the cross. 
 
 To begin His piiblic career in a way so humble and unostentatious, was 
 in strict keeping with the Avoi'k and character of Christ. It was easier for 
 Him to train a fevf, and gradually raise them to the high standard required 
 in His immediate followers. That His first adherents were attracted only 
 by religious considerations, tended to guard against any seeking to join 
 Him who were not moved to do so by a true spiritual sympathy — itself the 
 pledge of their fitness for disciples. To have drawn around Him great 
 multitudes by a display of supernatural povv'ers, would have destroj^ed all 
 His plans, for lie could have found no such sympathy in crowds thus 
 gathered. Having, therefore, begun with the lovvly l^and of four. He 
 turned His thoughts once more towards home, and set out with them next 
 day to Galilee. A fifth disciple joined Him on the homeward journey- 
 Philip, a townsman of the others. ISTothing is told of the circumstances, 
 though there can be no doubt that he had heard of Jesus, either from the 
 Baptist, to whom, like the others, he seems to have gone out ; or from the
 
 THE EETUEN FROM THE WILDERNESS. 299 
 
 four, as they travelled with liini on his own return. The simple Tvords 
 " Follow me," so often uttered afterwards, were enough to add him to the 
 little companj'. 
 
 The family of JMary, in which we no longer hear any mention of Joseph 
 — now, apparently, dead for a number of years, seems at this time to have 
 left Nazareth for a short sojourn at Cana, a village a few miles directly 
 north of its own town, on the other side of the hills behind it. A little 
 later, Capernaum was chosen instead, but it was to Cana, not Nazareth, 
 that Jesus returned from the Jordan. It lay ujion an almost isolated hill, 
 rising proudly above the pasture-land of the little valley of El Battauf, 
 and was afterwards a place of some importance, in the last Jewish war, 
 from its strong position. 
 
 Jesus and his companions had scarcely reached it, before Philip, full of 
 natural joy at his discovery of tbe Messiah in Jesus, sought out a friend 
 who lived in Cana, Nathana el by name, to let him know that he had found 
 Him " of whom Moses in the Law, and the prophets wrote — Jesus of 
 Nazareth, the Sou of Joseph." Nazareth was only a few miles off, but so 
 privately had Jesus lived in it that the name was new to Nathanael, and 
 the town, besides, had a questionable name. " Can any good thing," asked 
 he, " come out of Nazareth ? " 
 
 Jesus had won Peter by the greeting which had made him feel, that, by 
 a knowledge bej-oud human. He had already fixed His eye on him, before 
 His coming, as a future disciple. A similar display of supsrhuman know- 
 ledge now kindled faith in Nathanael. As he approached, Jesus greeted 
 him as " an Israelite indeed, in whom there was no guile." A glance had 
 been enough to show that he was one whose simplicity and uprightness of 
 spirit marked him as a member of the true Israel of God. Nathanael felt 
 that he was known, but wondered how Jesus could have learned about him. 
 A few words more, and he was gained for ever. He had been sitting alone, 
 under the fig-tree before his house or in his garden, hidden, as he thought, 
 from all, when Philip spoke to him. '• Before that Philip called thee," 
 said Jesus, " when thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw thee." The first 
 words had struck him ; but these, recalling the moments just gone, when, 
 very likely, he had been pondering the misery of Israel, in his fancied 
 seclusion, and longing for the Great Deliverer, — showed that his inmost 
 soul had been, all the while, open to the eye of Jesus, and completed the 
 conquest of his soul. " Eabbi," said he, " Thou art the Son of God ; Thou 
 art the King of Israel." He felt that the heart of the Messiah of God had 
 turned tenderly towards him, even before they had met. 
 
 The simple, prompt faith of Nathanael was no less pleasing to Jesus 
 than honouring to himself. There was something so fresh, so fervent, so 
 full-hearted in his words, now at the very beginning of Christ's public 
 work, that thej^ won a reply alike gracious and sublime. " Becaiise I said 
 unto thee, I saw thee under the fig-tree, believest thou ? Thou shalt see 
 greater things than these." Far higher grounds of faith would, hence- 
 forth, be granted ; for, from this time, " the heavens would be seen, as it 
 were, open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son 
 of Man," — the name consecrated to the Messiah from the days of Daniel,
 
 300 THE LIFE OF CHRIST, 
 
 and now permanently appropriated by Jesus. When He begins His work 
 in its full activity, there will be no longer a momentary opening of heaven, 
 as lately on the Jordan, but a constant intercourse between it and earth, 
 as of old in the vision of Jacob ; heavenly ministrations bringing countless 
 blessings down, and bearing back the tidings of the work of mercy, in 
 reconciling man to God. Language like this is, of course, metaphorical. 
 It may be understood literally, in one or two cases, in the Saviour's history, 
 but He cannot have referred to these. He, rather, spoke of the connection 
 between earth and heaven, which He had opened. They would be no 
 longer isolated from each other. Intercourse between them was henceforth 
 renewed, never again to cease ; intercourse, at first, between Him and His 
 Father, but gradually spreading over the earth, as men caught His image, 
 and reproduced His spirit. The angels descending from heaven with gifts 
 for the Son of Man to dispense to His brethren, would be visible to all 
 who saw the results in His kingdom over the earth. 
 
 Nathanael's name does not occur in the list of the Apostles, but it has 
 been assumed from the earliest times that he was Bartholomew, who is 
 always named next to Philip. It was a Jewish custom to change the 
 name when a public profession of religion was made. " Four things," says 
 R. Isaac, "have power to change a man's destiny — alms, prayer, change 
 of heart, and change of name." We have instances of such a change in 
 that of Simon, who is also indifferently mentioned as Peter, and as the son 
 of Jonas, and in Barnabas, whose proper name was Joses. Nathanael may 
 have been the personal name, while Bartholomew was simply an allusion 
 to him as the son of Talmai. 
 
 CPIAPTER XXIX. 
 
 THE OPENING OF CIIKISt's FUi?IIC MINISTRY. 
 
 r I HIE plain of El Battauf — on a hill in which rose the village of Cana, 
 -*- now utterly forsaken — stretches out in a pleasant rolling green sea, 
 embayed in a framework of softer or steeper hills. On the south, the 
 whitewashed tomb of a Mohammedan saint marks the top of the hill be- 
 hind Nazareth, and a little to the west of this, the ruined tower of 
 Sepphoris rises from a lower ridge. Entering the plain from the north, 
 the first village is Kefr Menda, with its deep spring, the water of which is 
 carefvilly kept for use in the hot summer ; rain water, collected in an open 
 pool, being used at other times. The flat roofs of many of the poor 
 cottages show frail shelters of wattled wands and twigs, the sleeping places 
 of the inmates below, in the sultry summer nights. They are, doubtless, 
 the counterparts of the booths of branches of olives, pines, myrtles, palms, 
 and other trees, which the ancient Jews, in ISTehemiah's day, made on their 
 house-roofs in Jerusalem, at the Feast of Tabei-nacles. 
 
 The plain undulates for two and three miles, in alternate sheets of grass 
 and grain, from Kefr Menda t© Sefuriyeh, the ancient capital of Galilee, 
 the " bird-like " Sepphoris. Several broad caravan roads, which lead to
 
 THE OPENING CF CHRIST'S PUBLIC MINISTRY. 301 
 
 the fords of the Jordan, cross it ; groves of figs and olives fringe the 
 southern edge and parts of the slopes of the hill on -which Sef uriyeh stands. 
 One overtakes asses bearing heavy loads of rich grass to the village, some 
 of them, perhaps, with an ear cropped off ; the penalty allowed to be in- 
 flicted by any peasant who has caught it feeding in his unprotected patch 
 of grain. Sefuriyeh is, even still, a large and prosperous village, stretch- 
 ing out on the western and southern slopes of its hill. A half-fallen tower, 
 of great antiquity, crowns the height, and from its top the eye ranges over 
 a pleasant landscape — the soft green plain, the fig and olive groves 
 fringing it, Kefr Menda to the north, Caua of Galilee a little further east, 
 and, to the south-east, the white tomb on the hill of JSTazareth ; a southern 
 sky, with its deep blue, overarching all. It is a delightful idyllic picture, 
 on the small scale that marks everything in Palestine. 
 
 Cana — " the reedy place " — as, no doubt, the first settlers found the plain 
 below, before it was drained and cultivated, is now so utterly desolate that 
 it is the favoui'ite hunting ground of the neighbourhood ; even leopards 
 being met at times among its broken houses, while the wild boar and the 
 jackal find haunts in the thick jungle of oak coi^pice on the slopes of the 
 wadys around. The houses are built of limestone, and some of them may 
 have been inhabited within the last fifty years. Sepp found the whole 
 sjiace on which the village seemed to have stood, only about a hundred 
 paces, each way. " I met," says he, " not a living soul ; not even a dog : 
 the watchman one never misses in Palestine was not there to give a sound. 
 My step echoed through the deserted little street and open square, as if 
 in the dead of night ; only flies held their marriage rejoicings in the 
 sunshine ; while a splendid rainbow stretched over the ruined tower of 
 Sepphoris." 
 
 It was very different in the days when Jesus came to Cana, after His 
 visit to the jireaching of John, on the Jordan. A marriage was afoot in 
 the circle of Mary's friends; possibly of her connections. That She and 
 Jesus were invited to the usual rejoicings, and that they accepted the in- 
 vitation, marks the worth of those who had given it, for the presence of 
 the saintly mother and her Son at such a time, are a pledge that all that 
 was innocent and beautiful characterized the festivities. 
 
 A marriage in the East has always been a time of great rejoicing. The 
 bridegroom, adorned and anointed, and attended by his groomsmen, 
 " the sons of the bridechamber," went, of old, as now, on the marriage day, 
 to the house of the bride, who awaited him, veiled from head to foot, alike 
 from Eastern ideas of propriety, and as a symbol of her subjection as a 
 wife. A peculiar girdle — the " attire " which a bride could not forget — 
 was always part of her dress, and a wreath of myrtle leaves, either real, 
 or of gold or gilded work — like our wreath of orange blossoms — was so 
 indispensable that it came to be used as a term for the bride herself. Her 
 hair, if she had not been married before, was left flowing ; her whole dross 
 was perfumed, and she glittered with as many jewels as the family boasted, 
 or, if poor, could boi'row for the occasion. Her bridal dress, her special 
 ornaments, the ointment and perfumes for her person, and presents of 
 fruit and other things, had been received in the earlier part of the day
 
 302 THE LIFE OF CHRIST, 
 
 from the bridegroom ; the bride, on her jjart, sending him, as her prescribed 
 gift, a shroud, -which he wore, as she did hers, on each New Year's Day 
 and Day of Atonement. Tlie Kabbis had fixed Wednesday as the day on 
 which maidens should be married, and Friday for widows, so that, if the 
 bride at Cana was now married for the first time, vre know the day of the 
 week on which tlie ceremony took jDlace. She might be very young, for 
 girls become wives in the East when twelve or fourteen, or even younger. 
 The bridegroom and bride both fasted all day before the marriage, and 
 confessed their sins in jDrayer, as on the Day of Atonement. When the 
 bride reached the house of her future husband's father, in which the mar- 
 riage was celebrated, the bridegroom received her, still deeply veiled, and 
 conducted her witiiin, with great rejoicings. Indeed, he generally set 
 out from his father's house in the evening to meet her, with flute-players 
 or singers before him ; his groomsmen, and others, with flaring torches 
 or lamps, escorting him amidst loud rejoicing, which rose still higher as 
 he led her back. ISTeighbours thronged into the streets. Flutes and drums 
 and shrill cries filled the air, and the i^rocession, as it passed on, was 
 swelled by a train of maidens, friends of the bride and bridegroom, who 
 had been waiting for it. The Talmud has preserved a snatch of one of the 
 songs sung by the bridesmaids and girls as they danced before the bride, 
 on the way to the bridegroom's house. In a free translation it runs some- 
 thing like this : — 
 
 " Her eyelids are not stained with blue, 
 Her red cheeks are her own ; 
 Her hair hangs wavinj? as it grew, 
 Her grace were wealth, alone ! " 
 
 In the house of the bridegroom's father, which was, for a time, the home 
 of the young couple, things went men-ily ; a feast being 23repared, to which 
 all the friends and neighbours were invited. It was an essential part of 
 the ceremony, for even so early as Jacob's day, " to make a feast " had be- 
 come the common expression for the celebration of a marriage. 
 
 The bride did not join in this festivity, however, but remained apart, 
 among the women, shrouded in the long white veil of betrothal ; unseen, 
 as yet, even by her husband. ISTor did she take any part in the subsequent 
 amusements, or show herself at all. It was only when husband and wife 
 were finally alone, that the veil was, for the first time, removed. 
 
 Meanwhile, the family rejoicings went on apace. The feast was provided 
 at the cost of the bridegroom, and continued usually for seven days, with 
 the greatest mirth. The bridegroom wore a crown, often of flowers— the 
 crown with v.diich, in the Song of Solomon, it is said, " his mother crowned 
 him in the day of his espousals, in the day of the gladness of his heart " — 
 and sat " decked, like a priest, in his ornaments ; " the bride sitting in the 
 women's apartment, "adorned with her jewels." Singing, music, and 
 dancing, merry riddles, and the play of wit, amused the guests, night after 
 night while the feast was prolonged, and it was only after the excitement 
 had worn itself out, that life settled down again into colourless monotony. 
 
 It was to some such festivity that Jesus had been invited v.-ith His five 
 disciples. The earthen floor and the ledge round the wall would be spread
 
 THE OPENING 0? CHRIST'S PUBLIC MINISTRY. 803 
 
 with carpets, the walls hung with garlands ; the spirits of all bright and 
 cheerful as the decorated chamber, and the modest rejoicings, in no way 
 clouded by the presence of Mary's Sou and His followers. There was no 
 excess, we may be sure, but the flow of harmless entertainment brightened 
 all faces. John had beeu a.n ascetic — the highest form of religious life 
 hitherto known in Israel. He had spent his days in penitential austerity 
 and wilderness seclusion; had drunk no wine, had eaten no pleasant food, 
 and had kept apart from human afEairs and relationships. But a new 
 and higher ideal of religion was now to be introduced. Jesus came to 
 spiritualize the humblest duties of life, and sanctify its simplest incidents, 
 so as to ennoble it as a whole. Henceforth, pleasures and enjoyments 
 were not to be shunned as unholy ; religion was not to thrive on the 
 mortification of every human instinct, and the repression of every cheerful 
 emotion. It would mix with the crowd of men, affect no singularity, take 
 part in the innocent festivities of life, interest itself in whatever interested 
 men at large, and yet, amidst all, remain consecrated and pure ; in the 
 Avorld, by sympathy and active brotherhood, but not of it ; human in its 
 outward form, but heavenly in its elevation and spirit. 
 
 The rejoicings had continued for some evenings, when a misfortune 
 happened that threatened to disgrace the bridegroom and his family for 
 life in the eyes of their neighbours. The supply of wine ran out. As in 
 all wine-growiug countries, the population were not only temperate, but 
 simple in their mode of life, beyond what the natives of a colder climate can 
 imagine. Yet wine was their symbol of joy and festivity. Jotham, in the 
 far back days of the Judges, had praised it as " cheering God and man," 
 and among other passages, a Psalm liad spoken of it as making glad the 
 heart, though its immoderate tise had been condemned in many Scriptures. 
 " Wine is the best of all medicines," said a Hebrew proverb : " where wine 
 is wanting, doctors thrive." " May there be always wine and life in the 
 mouth of the Eabbi," was one of the toasts at their merry meetings. 
 But, Avithal, this referred only to its careful use. Among the parables in 
 which the people delighted, one ran thus— "When Koali planted his vine- 
 yard, Satan came and asked him what he was doing ? ' Planting a vine- 
 yard,' was the rej^ly, ' What is it for ? ' ' Its fruits, green or dry, are 
 sweet and pleasant : we make wine of it, which gladdens the heart.' ' I 
 should like to have a hand in the planting,' said Satan. ' Good,' replied Noah. 
 Satan then brought a lamb, a lion, a sow, and an ape, killed them in the 
 vineyard, and let their blood run into the roots of the vines. From this 
 it comes that a man, before he has taken wine, is simple as a lamb, which 
 knows nothing, and is dumb before its shea,rers ; when he has drunk 
 moderately, he grows a lion, and thinks there is not his like ; if he d..riuk 
 too much, he turns a swine, and. vrallows in the mire ; if he drink still 
 more, he becomes a filthy ape, falling hither and thither, and knowing 
 nothing of what he does." 
 
 The good and the evil of wine were thus familiar, but we may be certain 
 that only its better side, as enjoyed among a people at once simple and 
 sober, who held excess in abhorrence, and in a household where licence 
 was not to be thought of — was seen at the marriage in Cana, and this
 
 304: THE LIFE OP CUEIST. 
 
 temperate use of it Jesns cheerfully sanctioned. Mary, -with her gentle 
 TV'omauly feeling for the shame of seeing inhospitality that threatened the 
 host, indulged the hojoe that He— whose mysterious hirth, honoured by a 
 special star and the songs of angels, and whose changed look and bearing, 
 since His Jordan visit, could not have escaped her— would now put forth 
 the hidden powers she might well believe Him to have, to brighten the 
 family circle, in whose life this feast was so great an event. She had, 
 however, to learn, by a gentle rebuke, that His human relation to her 
 was now merged and lost in a higher. Using an every-day form of words, 
 familiar for ages to his nation, with a look of love and tenderness, He 
 waived her implied solicitation aside — " Woman, what is there to me and 
 thee ? Mine hour is not yet come." There was no disrespect in the word 
 "woman," for He afterwards used it to her, when on the cross, in His last 
 tender offices of love. It was as if He had said, " Our sj^heres lie apart. 
 Hitherto you have known Me as your Son. Henceforth, I am much more. 
 My Divine powers are only for Divine ends : at the call of My Father 
 alone, for His glory only. He fixes My hour for all the woi'ks He wills 
 Me to do, and in this case it has not yet come." " Whatsoever He saith 
 unto you, do it," said Mary, on hearing His answer— for it had no harsh- 
 ness to her. 
 
 The superstitious dread of ceremonial 'uncleanness, among the Jews, 
 made ample provision necessary in every household, for constant washings 
 of vessels, or of the person. No one ate without washing the hands ; each 
 guest had his feet washed on his arrival, for sandals were left outside and 
 only naked feet allowed to touch a host's floor ; and the washing of " cujis, 
 and jugs, and bottles," as the Talmud tells us, '•'went on the whole day." 
 Six great jars of stone, therefore, for such purifications, stood ranged out- 
 side the door, or in the chamber; their narrow mouths perhaps filled with 
 green leaves, as is still the custom, to keep the water cool. "Fill the 
 waterpots v>'ith water," said Jesus, adding, when they had carefully filled 
 them to the brim, " Draw out, and take supplies to the governor of the 
 feast." But the water was now glowing wine. His words to His mother 
 and the servants had been unnoticed by the company, and the fresh supply, 
 when tasted first, as the fashion was, by the chief man of the feast, on 
 whom it fell to see to the entertainment of the guests, was found so good, 
 that he playfully rallied the bridegroom on keeping the best to the last. 
 
 Tlie " glory " of Jesus had always shone, to those who had eyes to see it, 
 in the spotless beauty of His life ; but this was a revelation of it in a new 
 form. It was " the beginning " of His miracles, wrought, as was fitting, 
 in stillness and privacy, without display, — to cheer and brighten those 
 around Him. His presence at such a feast showed His sympathy with 
 human joys, human connections, and human relationships. He taught by 
 it, for the first time, that common life in all its phases, may be raised to a 
 religious dignity, and that the loving smile of God, like the tender blue 
 above, looks down on the whole round of existence. He had not been in- 
 vited as the chief guest, or as in any way distinguished, for He was not 
 yet The Teacher, famed throughout the land, nor had His miracles begun 
 to reveal His higher claims. But He took the place assigned Him as one
 
 THE OPENING OF CHIIIST'S PUBLIC MINISTEY. 305 
 
 among the many, as uafcurally as the lowliest of the company, and remained 
 unknown till His Divine glory revealed Him. 
 
 His miraculous power, indeed, was only one aspect of this " glory." In 
 a far higher sense it was " manifested " in His Person. It was, doubtless, 
 amazing to jDOSsess such powers; but, that One whose word, or mere ^du, 
 could command the obedience of nature, should mingle as a friend in an 
 humble marriage festivity, a man amongst men, was still more wonderfid. 
 Nothing could better illustrate His perfect manhood, than His identifying 
 Himself thus with the humble incidents of a private circle. He had grown 
 up under the common ordinances of human existence, as a child, a son, a 
 brother, a friend, and a neighbour. As a Jew, He had shared in the social, 
 civil, and religious life of His nation. His presence at this marriage, 
 showed that He continued the same familiar relations to His fellow-men, 
 after His consecration, as before it. Neither His nationality^ nor educa- 
 tion, nor mental characteristics, nor natural temperament, narrowed His 
 sympathies. Though burdened with the high commission of the Messiah, 
 He retained a vivid interest in all things human. With us, any supreme 
 pre-occupation leaves only apathy for other things. But in Christ, no one 
 faculty or emotion appeared in excess. His fulness of nature suited itself 
 to every occasion. Strength and grace, wisdom and love, courage and 
 purity, which are the one side of our being, were never displayed so har- 
 moniously, and so perfectly, as in Him ; but the incidents of this marriage 
 feast show that the other side, the feminine gentleness and purity, which 
 are the ideal virtues of woman, were no less His characteristics. They 
 throw light on the words of St. Paul, " In Him is neither Jew nor Greek, 
 bond nor free, male nor female." He could subdue Pilate by His calm 
 dignity, but He also ministered to the happiness of a village festival. He 
 could withstand the struggle with the Prince of Darkness in the wilder. 
 ness, and through life, but He wept over the grave of Lazarus. He could 
 let the rich young ruler, if he would, go his way to perish, but He sighed 
 as He healed the man that was dumb. He pronounced the doom of 
 Jerusalem with a lofty sternness, but He wept as He thought how it had 
 neglected the things of its peace. He craved sympathy, and He showed 
 it with equal tenderness : He was calm amidst the wildest popular tumult, 
 but He sought the lonely mountain for midnight prayer. He sternly re- 
 buked Peter for hinting a temptation, but He excused his sleep in Geth- 
 semane by the weakness of the flesh. He gave away a crown when on the 
 cross, but He was exceeding sorrowful unto death in the garden. He 
 never used His miraculous powers to relieve Himself, but He provided for 
 the multitude in the wilderness. His judges quailed before Him, but He 
 forgot His dying agonies, to commend His mother to the lifelong care of a 
 friend. He rebuked death, that He might give her son back to the widow; 
 and he took part in the rejoicings of an humble marriage, that He might 
 elevate and sanctify human joys. In the fullest sense He was a man, but 
 not in the sense in which manly virtues are opposed to those of woman, 
 for He showed no less the gentleness, purity, and tenderness of the- one 
 sex, than the strength and nobility of the other. He was the Son of Man, 
 in the grand sense of being representative of humanity as a whole. Man 
 and woman, alike, have in Him their perfect ideal. x
 
 306 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 An Indian apologue tells us tliafc a Brahmin, one of whose disciples had 
 been perplexed respecting miracles, ordered a flower-pot filled with earth 
 to be brought him, and having put a seed into it before the doubter, 
 caused it to spring up, blossom, and bear fruit, while he still stood by. " A 
 miracle," cried the young man. " Son," replied the Brahmin, " what else 
 do you see done here in an hour than nature does more slowly round the 
 year ? " The wine which the guests had drunk from the bridegroom's 
 bounty, and possibly from the added gifts of friends, had been slowly 
 matured in the vine by mysterious elaboration, from light, and heat, and 
 moisture, and the salts of the earth, none of which had more apparent 
 affinity to it than the water which Jesus transformed. The miracle in 
 nature was not less real or wonderful than that of the marriage feast, and 
 strikes us less, only by its being familiar. At the threshold of Christ's 
 miraculous works it is well to realize a fact so easily overlooked. A 
 miracle is only an exercise, in a new way, of the Almighty power we see 
 daily producing perhaps the same results in nature. Infinitely varied 
 forces are at work around us every moment. From the sun to the atom, 
 from the stone to the thinking brain and beating heart, they circulate 
 sleeplessly, through all things, for ever. As they act and react on each 
 other, the amazing result is produced which we know as nature, but how 
 many mysterious inter-relations, of which we know nothing, may offer 
 endlessly varied means for producing specific ends, at the command of 
 God ? Nor is there anything more amazing iu the works of Christ than 
 in the dail}^ phenomena of nature. The vast universe, embracing heavens 
 above heavens, stretching out into the Infinite — with constellations 
 anchored on the vast expanse like tiny islet clusters on the boundless 
 ocean, is one great miracle. It was wonderful to create, but to sustain 
 creation is, itself, to create anew each moment. Suns and planets, living 
 creatures in their endless races, all that the round sky of each planet 
 covers — seas, air, sweeping valleys, lofty mountains, and the million won- 
 ders of the brain and heart and life of their innumerable iDopulations, have 
 no security, each moment, that they shall commence another, except in 
 the continued exjoenditure of fresh creative energy. Miracles are only the 
 momentary intercalation of unsuspected laws which startle by their 
 novelty, but are no more miraculous than the most common incident of 
 the great mystery of nature. 
 
 The beginning of the public career of Jesus as Messiah at a time so 
 joyful as a household festival was appropriate. His bounteous gift fitly 
 marked the opening of His kingly work, like the fountains flowing with 
 wine at the coronation of earthly kings. But a king very different from 
 earthly monarchs was now entering on His reign. 'No outward prepara- 
 tion is made : He has no worldly wealth or rich pi'ovision to lavish away. 
 Yet, though He has no wine, water itself, at His word, becomes wine, rich 
 as the finest vintage. Till His hour has come. He remains passive and 
 self-restrained, awaiting the moment divinely appointed for His glory 
 shining out among men. Once come, the slumbering power, till now 
 unrevealed, breaks forth, never to cease its gracious work of blessing and 
 healing, till the kingdom He came to found is triumphant in His death.
 
 THE OPENING OF CHRIST'S PUBLIC MINISTRY. 307 
 
 The ago of Jesus at His entrance on His public work has been very 
 variously estimated. Ewalcl supposes that Ho was about thirty-four, 
 fixing His birth three years before the death of Herod. Wieseler, on the 
 contrary, believes Him to have been iu His thirty-first year, setting His 
 liirth a few months before Herod's death. Bunsen, Anger, Winer, Scliiirer, 
 and Eenan agree with this : Lichtenstein makes Him thirty-two. Hausi-ath 
 and Keim, on the other hand, think that He began His ministry in the 
 year a.d. 34, but they do not give any supposed date for His birth, though 
 if that of Ewald be taken as a medium, He must now have been forty 
 years old, v>'hile, if Wieseler's date be preferred. He AvovaCi onlj^ have been 
 thirty-seven. The statemeiit of the Gospel, that He was " about thirty 
 years of age when He began" His public work, is so indefinite as to allow 
 free conjecture. In any case. He must have been thirty-one at His 
 baptism, from His having been born before Herod's death. It was even 
 supi^osed by Irenasus, from the saying of the Jews, — " Thou art not ycfc 
 fifty years old," and from His allusion to the forty-six years during which 
 the Temple had been building, that He was between foi'ty and fifty at His 
 death. Amidst such difference, exactness is impossible, and it seems 
 safest to keep to the generality of St. Luke, by thinking of Jesus as about 
 thirty — though not younger — at His baptism. 
 
 The stay at Cana seems to have been short. It may have been only a 
 family visit, or it may have been, that, from some cause, Mary had gone 
 for a time to live there ; but, in either case, Jesus very soon removed from 
 a locality so little suited to His work, from its isolation, and remoteness 
 from the centres of life and population. He had resolved to make Galilee, 
 in which He was at home, the chief scene of His labours. He was, more- 
 over, safer there than either in Judea or Perea, for the hierarchy could 
 reach Him more easily in the one, and the tyranny of Antipas was less 
 restrained in the wild territory of the other. The kingdom He came to 
 set up must grow silently, and by slow, peaceful degrees, like the mustard 
 seed, to which He compared it, and it could not do so in any part so well 
 as in Galilee. Far away from turbulent Judea, He escaped the excite- 
 ments, more or less political, the insurrections, and wild dreams of national 
 supremacy, ever fermenting at Jerusalem, and avoided excitiug suspicion, 
 or having His spiritual aims perverted by the revolutionary violence of 
 the masses. His kingdom was not of this world, like the Messianic 
 dominion fondly expected by the nation, bi;t the far mightier reign of 
 "The Truth." 
 
 Galilee was, however, in some respects, an unfavourable centre. Jeru- 
 salem, always morose and self-sufficient, ridiculed its population, and 
 affected to deny that any prophet had risen in it, though Elijah, the 
 greatest of the illustrious order, Elislia, Hosea, and Na^lium, — had been 
 Galilaeans. The wits of the capital, moreover, ridiculed them for their 
 speech, for they substituted one letter for aiiother, and had a broad pro- 
 nunciation. Their culture, and even their capacity were contemned, though 
 so many prophets had risen amongst them, though they could boast of 
 Barak, the conqueror of the Canaanites, and of many famous Eabbis, and 
 though the high-minded Judas the Zealot had shed honour on them, in
 
 308 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Christ's own day, as tlie great apostle Paul, sprung from a Giscliala famll}'', 
 was to do hereafter. But hatred, or jealousy, like love, is blind. 
 
 It is hard to know how early the Eabbinical fancy of two Messiahs 
 arose, but, if it had already taken any shape in Christ's lifetime, it mvist 
 rather have hindered than helped His great work. The Messiah of the 
 House of Joseph was to appear in Galilee, and, after gathering round hira 
 the long-lost Ten Tribes, was to march, at their head, to Jerusalem, to 
 receive the submission of the Messiah of the House of David, and, having 
 united the whole kingdom once more, was to die by the hands of Gog and 
 Magog, the nortliorn heathen, as a sacrifice for the sins of Jeroboam, and 
 of the nation at large. But these fancies took a definite form only in a 
 later age, and we find no trace of them in the New Testament. Who can 
 tell, however, how old their germs may have been ? They show, at least, 
 what the application of passages from the prophets to Christ's first appear- 
 ing in Galilee also implies, that the Galilteans cherished the great i^romise 
 of the Messiah. Frank, high-spirited, and comparatively unprejudiced, 
 they were more ready than other Jews to listen to a new teacher, and the 
 thousands who had rekindled their zeal on the banks of the Jordan, under 
 the preaching of John, had already, on their return, spread around them 
 the excited expectation of an immediate advent of the Messiah, v/hicli the 
 Baptist had announced. But though the soil was thus specially favour- 
 able for His earlier work, the fame of Jesus was hereafter to spread, in 
 spite of all local prejudices, till, at last. He should hear Himself pro- 
 claimed by the multitude, even in the streets of Jerusalem, as Jesus, the 
 prophet of Nazareth of Galilee. 
 
 Nazareth, itself, like Cana, lay too far from the centres of pojiulation 
 for Christ's public work, and there was, besides, the inevitable draAvback 
 of its having known Him during the long years of His humble privacy. 
 He, doubtless, felt, from the first, what He afterwards expressed with so 
 much feeling, that "a prophet is not without honour, save in his own 
 country, and in his own house." His fellow-townsmen, and even His own 
 family, could not realize that one whose lowly position and unmarked 
 career, they had had before them through life, could be so much above 
 them. It was, in infinitely greater degree, the same pettiness and inability 
 to estimate the familiar justly, that, in our own age, made John Wilson 
 write, that as " the northern Highlanders do not admire ' Waverley,' so, I 
 presume, the south Highlanders despise 'Guy Mannering.' The West- 
 moreland peasants think Wordsworth a fool. In Borrowdale, Southey is 
 not known to exist. I met ten men in Hawick who do not think Hogg a 
 poet, and the whole city of Glasgow think me a madman." With such 
 counteracting prejudices, Nazareth was altogether unsuited for the longer 
 residence of Jesus, and hence He seems never to have returned to it, after 
 His baptism, except for a passing visit. 
 
 He chose for H-s future home the shores of the Lake of Galilee, at that 
 time the most populous, as they are still the most delightful, part of 
 Palestine. Henceforth, the "jewel" of its banks- Capernaum— became 
 " His own city," and for a time, at least. His mother and His " brethren" 
 seem also to have made it their home, though a little later we find Jesus
 
 THE OPENING OF CHEIST S PUBLIC MINISTRY. 309 
 
 living pcvmaneutly as a guest in tlie house of Peter, as if they had once 
 more left the town, and returned to Nazareth. From this centre His 
 future work was carried on. From it He set out on His missionary 
 journeys, and He returned to it from them to find a welcome and a home. 
 
 Capernaum lay on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, at the spot, 
 a little way from the head of the lake, where the shore recedes in a more 
 westerly arc, forming a small cape, from which the view embraces the 
 whole coast, in every direction. It could never have been very large, for 
 Josephus only once mentions it, as a village to which he was carried by 
 his soldiers, when hurt by a fall from his horse, which had stuck in the 
 marsh below Bethsaida Julias. The name does not occur in the Old 
 Testament. Capernaum was the boundary town between the territory of 
 Philip and Antipas, and, as such, had a custom-house and a garrison. 
 One of the officers stationed for a time in it, a foreigner, and, doubtless, 
 a proselyte, had, in Christ's day, built a fine synagogue, as a mark, at once 
 of his friendly feeling to the Jewish nation, and of homage to Jehovah. 
 The whitewashed houses were built of black basalt or lava, still scattered 
 in boulders, here and there, over the neighbourhood, and gives the ground 
 a dark appearance when the tall spring grass has withered and left it 
 bare. The synagogue, however, was of white limestone. Great blocks of 
 chiselled stone, finely carved— once its frieze, architrave, and cornices- 
 still lie among the waving thistles, where the town formerly stood. Tho 
 walls are now nearly level with the groimd, most of the pillars and stones 
 having been carried off to build into house walls, or burn for lime, though 
 some of its double row of columns, hewn in one block, and of their 
 Corinthian capitals and massy pedestals, still speak of its former splendour. 
 Round the synagogue, and reaching up the gentle slope behind, stretched 
 the streets and squares, covering an area of half-a-mile in length, and a 
 quarter in breadth ; the main street running north, to the neighbouring 
 Chorazin. 
 
 At the north end of the town, two tombs yet remain ; one built of lime- 
 stone, underground, in an excavation hollowed out with great labour in. 
 the hard basalt ; the other, a rectangular building, above ground, large 
 enough to hold a great number of bodies, and once, apparently, white- 
 washed, to warn passers by not to defile themselves by too near an ap- 
 proach to the dead. 
 
 Capernaum, in Christ's day, was a thriving, busy town. The " highway 
 to the Sea," from Damascus to Ptolemais, — now Acre, but still knoT\Ti by 
 the earlier name in the seventeenth century, — ran through it, bringing no 
 little local traffic, and also opening the markets of the coast to the rich 
 yield of the neighbouring farms, orchards, and vineyards, and the abun- 
 dant returns of the fisheries of the lake. The townsfolk, thus, as a rule, 
 enjoyed the comfort and plenty we see in the houses of Peter and Matthew, 
 and were even open to the charge of being " winebibbers and gluttonous," 
 which implied generous entertainment. They were proud of their town, 
 and counted on its steady growth and unbounded prosperity, little dream- 
 ing of the riiin which would one day make even its site a question. 
 
 It was in this town that Jesus settled, amidst a mixed population of
 
 310 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 fisher-people, grain and fruit agents, local tradesmen, and the many classes 
 and occupations of a thriving station on a great line of caravan ti-affic. It 
 was a point that brought Him in contact with Gentile as well as Jewish 
 life. Households like that of Peter, proselytes like the centurion, and the 
 need of a large synagogue, imply a healthy religiousness in some, but the 
 woe pronounced on the town by Jesus, after a time, shows that whatever 
 influence He may have had on a few, the citizens as a whole v/ere too 
 much engrossed with their daily affairs to pay much heed to Him. 
 
 An hour's walk behind the town leads to gentle hill slopes, which, in 
 April, are thinly covered with crisp grasses, and stalks of weeds. From 
 the top the eje follows the course of the Jordan as it enters the lake in 
 two streams, through a marshy delta, the favourite pasture ground for 
 herds of huge, ungainly, fierce, and often dangerous black buffaloes, which 
 delight to wallow by day in such marshy places, up to the neck in water 
 or mud, and return at night to their masters, the Arabs of the Jordan 
 valley. Jesus must often have seen these herds luxuriating idly in this 
 swampy paradise, for they are not used for labour in the district round 
 the lake, though they are sometimes set to drag the plough in the parts 
 near the Waters of Merom. The lake itself stretched out, north and 
 south, like a pear in shape, the broad end towards the noi'th ; or like a 
 lyre, from which, indeed, it got its ancient name of Chinneroth. Its 
 greatest width, from the ancient Magdala on the west side, to Gergesa on 
 the east, is six and tliree-quarter miles, and its extreme length, a little 
 over twelve. There are no pine-clad mountains, no bold headlands, no 
 lofty precipices ; the hills — except at Khan Minyeh, the ancient Tarichisa, 
 a little below Capernaum, where there is a small cliff — rise gradually, in a 
 dull unifoi'm brown from the lake, or from a fringe of plain, on the south 
 and east, to about 1,000 feet ; on the north-west to about 600. No promi- 
 nent peak breaks the outline, but the ever-changing lights and the rich 
 tints of sunrise and sunset, prevent monotony. From the south of the 
 lake, the top of Hermon, often white with snow, stands out sharp and 
 clear in the bright sky, as if close at hand, and, towards the north, the 
 twin peaks of Hattin crown a wild gorge, a little way below Capernaum. 
 On the eastern side the hills rise in a barren wall, seamed with a few deep 
 ravines, black basalt predominating, though varied here and there by the 
 lighter grey limestone. Nor trees, nor village, nor spots of cultivated 
 land break the desolation which spreads like a living death over the land- 
 scape, except along the narrow stripe of green, about a quarter of a mile 
 in breadth, that fringes the lake. It was among these waste and lonely 
 hills that Jesus often retired to escape the crowds which often oppressed 
 Him. The hills on the western side slope more gently, and rise and fall 
 in rounded tops, such as mark the softer limestone. The line of the shore, 
 in the upper reaches, is broken into a series of little bays of exquisite 
 beauty. 
 
 The Rabbis were wont to say that God had made seven seas in the land 
 of Canaan, but had chosen only one for Himself— the Sea of Galilee. 
 Josephus rightly called the laud on its borders, " the crown " of Palestine. 
 The plain of Geunesareth begins at Khan Minyeh, about two miles below
 
 THE OPENING OF CHEIST's PUBLIC MINISTRY. 311 
 
 Capernamn, filling in the bow-like recess whicli the hills make from that 
 point to Magdala. It is as romantic as beautiful, for the raviue at its 
 southern end leads, at a short distance, to the towering limestone cliffs of 
 Arbela, on whose heights numerous eagles now build among the airy- 
 caverns, once the fortress alternately of robbers and patriots, to whom the 
 valley offered a way to the lake. Gennesareth was the richest spot in 
 Palestine; five streamlets from the neighbouring hills quickening its rich 
 dark volcanic soil into amazing fertilit3\ It measures only about tAvo and 
 a half miles from north to south, by about a mile in depth, but, in the 
 days of Christ it must have been enehantingly beautiful. " Its soil," says 
 Josephus, " is so fruitful that all kinds of trees grow in it. "Walnuts 
 flourish in great i)lenty ; there are palm-trees also, which require heat, and 
 figs and olives, which require a more temperate air, Nature seems, as it 
 were, to have done violence to herself, to cause the plants of different lands 
 to grow together. Grapes and figs ripen for ten months in the year, and 
 other fruits fill up the other months." 
 
 No wonder the fruits of Gennesareth put to shame all else in the 
 markets of Jerusalem. Its soil is still fertile in the extreme, and it lies 
 between five and six hundred feet below the Mediterranean, which makes 
 it very warm. Wheat, barley, millet, rice, melons, grapes, the common 
 vegetables, tobacco, and indigo flourish, and date-palms, figs, citrons, and 
 oranges are not wanting. Gennesareth melons are exported to Damascus 
 and Acre, and are greatly prized. The oleanders and wild figs, palms, 
 etc., rise here and there in rank luxuriance, and there can be no doubt 
 that, in former times, when the whole soil was carefully tilled, few semi- 
 tropical plants would have failed to grow. The climate of the lake shore, 
 generally, is. so mild even in Avintcr, that snow seldom falls. In summer, 
 on the other hand, it is oppressively hot, for except at the plain of Gen- 
 nesareth, which enjoys cool breezes from Lebanon, the hills shut out the 
 west wind, almost the only abatement of the intensity of the summer in 
 Palestine, and hence tlie people of Tiberias are glad to sleep in shelters of 
 straw or leaves on their roofs during the hot months. Melons ripen four 
 Aveeks sooner than at Acre and Damascus, and though wheat is not so 
 early ripe as at Jericho, wdiere the harvest is in May, it is ready for the 
 sickle in June. A spot so charming could not, however, escape some, 
 drawback. This sultry moist heat causes, along the marshy lake edge, a 
 ]jrevalence of fever, and sometimes brings jiestilence, and ophthalmia and 
 sickness of various kinds are only too common. 
 
 The shores of the plain are white with myriads of little shells, over 
 which the transparent, crystal-like waters rise and fall with the wind, and 
 the side next the hills is shut in by a fringe of oleanders, rich, each May, 
 in red and white blossom. In the clays of Christ the whole landscape was 
 full of life. Busy towns and villages croAvded the shores, and the waters 
 swarmed Avith boats employed in the fisheries, which even gave their 
 names to seA-eral of the tOAvns. South of Capernaum lay the busy city of 
 Taricheea, or " Pickling ToAvn," — the great fish-curing port — which had 
 boats enough to meet the Romans, a generation later, in a deadly sea-fight 
 on the lake, in which eight thousand of its citizens, and of those who had
 
 312 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 taken refuge in it, were slain, and nearly forty thousand sold as slaves. 
 This and Tiberias were the two ports in which the fishermen of Capernaum 
 and Bcthsaida found a ready sale for their freights. A little further south 
 rose the houses of Magdala, or Migdal-El— " the Tower of God"— now 
 Medschel— the home of the Mary who bears its name. Then came Tiberias, 
 with its splendid palace, grand public buildings, huge arsenal, famous 
 baths, glittering in the bright sunshine, and its motley, busy population; 
 town after town rising in the distance. To the north, on the slope of the 
 hills, a short way off, lay Chorazin, named, it might seem, from the 
 " coracin " fish mentioned by Josej)hus as found in its neighbourhood. At 
 the head of the lake, on the other side of the Jordan, Bethsaida — "the 
 Fisher's Town " — rebuilt, and re-named Julias, by the tetrarch Philip, was 
 fresh from the hands of the masons and sculptors, and along the eastern 
 shore lay Gergesa, Gamala, Hippos, and other swarming hives of men- 
 The landscape is now very different. The thickly peopled shore is almost 
 deserted. Tiberias, then so magnificent, has shrunk into a small and 
 decaying town, like every place under Turkish rule ; the white towns and 
 villages, once reflected in the waters, have disappeared; the fleets of fish- 
 ing boats are now replaced by one solitary crazy boat ; the richly wooded 
 hills are bare ; the paradise-like plains are overgrown with thorns and 
 thistles. The shore — varied by stretches of sand, intervals of white tiny 
 shells, shingle with larger shells here and there, and great beds of black 
 basalt, which show the volcanic nature of the district, as do also the warm 
 baths at Tiberias— is silent. Near the water, reeds and rushes grow in 
 long reaches, in the flatter swampy parts — a favourite haunt of the pelican, 
 and many other birds, but, above all, of the turtle-dove, the bird dearest 
 from of old to the Jew. The whole must have been beautiful, however, in 
 former days to make the Emperor Titus compare it with the Lake of Neuf- 
 chatel, in Switzerland, though, nowadays, the comparison seems fanciful. 
 
 It was in Capernaum that Jesus chose His home, in the midst of this 
 life and beauty, l)eside the gleaming lake, embosomed deep on this, its 
 western shore, in soft terraced hills, laughing with fruitfulness ; the 
 higher hills of Upper Galilee rising beyond, and the majestic Hermon 
 closing the glorious landscape. The view over the waters showed the 
 steep slopes — now yellow limestone, now black basalt— which led up to 
 the Gaulonitis country. Capernaum was the town of His three chief 
 apostles, Peter, John, and James, and also of Andrew. Here He healed 
 the centurion's slave, and raised the daughter of Jairus ; called Matthew 
 from the booth where he took the customs dues, and healed the mother-in 
 law of Peter. From a boat near the shore, close bj^ He preached to the 
 crowds, and it was in the waters off the town that He vouchsafed to Peter 
 and his brother the miraculous draught of fishes. 
 
 The whole neighbourhood, indeed, is sacred to the memory of Jesus. 
 The Lake of Galilee had been chosen by God for Himself, and honoured 
 above all seas of the earth, in a sense which the Rabbis little dreamed 
 The men, the fields, the valleys round it, are immortalized by their 
 association with the Saviour. There were the vinej'ards on the hill slopes, 
 round which tlicir owner planted a hedge, and in which he built a watch-
 
 THE OPENING OF CHRIST's PUELIC MINISTRY. 313 
 
 tower, and dug a wiuc-press. There were the sunny hills, on which the 
 old wine had grown, and the new was growing, for which the honseholdcr 
 would take care to provide the new leather bottles. The plain of Gcn- 
 nesareth was the enamelled meadow, on which, in spring, ten thousand 
 lilies Avere robed in more than the glory of Solomon, and where, in winter, 
 the grass was cast into the oven. It was on such pastures as those ai'onnd, 
 that the shepherd left the ninetj-and-nine sheep, to seek, in the mountains, 
 the one that was lost, and bring it back, on his shoulders, rejoicing when 
 found. The ravens, that have neither storehouse nor barn, daily sailed 
 over from the cliffs of Arbela, to seek their food on the shore of the lake, 
 and from the same cliffs, from time to time, flew forth the haAvks, to make 
 the terrified hen gather her chickens under her wings. The orchards of 
 spreading fig-trees were there, on which the dresser of the vineyard, in 
 three years, found no fruit, and in which the grain of mustard seed grew 
 into so great a tree that the fowls of the air lodged in its branches. 
 Across the lake rose the hills of Gaulonitis, which the idly busy Rabbis 
 watched for signs of the weather. A murky red, seen above them in the 
 morning, was a text for these sky-prophets to predict " foul weather to- 
 day, for the sky is red and lowering," and it was when the sun sank, red 
 and glowing, behind the hills in the west, that the solemn gossips, return- 
 ing from their many prayers in the synagogue, made sure that it would 
 be fair weather to-morrow. It was when the sea-cloud was seen driving 
 over the hill-tops from Ptolemais and Carmel that neighbours warned 
 each other that a shower was coming, and the clouds sailing north, 
 towards Safed and Hcrmon, were the accepted earnest of coming heat. 
 The daily business of Capernaum, itself, supplied many of the illustrations 
 so frequently introduced into the discourses of Jesus. He might see in 
 the bazaar of the town, or on the street, the rich travelling merchant, who 
 exchanged a heavy load of Babjdonian carpets for the one lusti'ous pearl 
 that had, perhaps, found its Avay to the lake from distant Ceylon. Fisher- 
 men, and publicans, and dressers of vineyards passed and repassed each 
 moment. Over in Julias, the favourite town of the tetrarch Philip ; below, 
 in Tiberias, at the court of Antipas, lived the magnates, who delighted to 
 be called " gracious lords," and walked in silk robes. The young Salome 
 lived in the one town ; her mother, Herodias, in the other ; and the 
 intercourse between the two courts could not have escaped the all-observ- 
 ing eye of Jesus, as He moved about in Capernaum. 
 
 It was this town, on the border between the districts of Philip and 
 Antipas, and on the highway of commerce and travel by the shore of the 
 lake, in the midst of thickly sown towns and villages, that Jesus selected 
 as His future home. He seems, at first, to have lived with His mother 
 and His brethren, and the few disciples He had already gathered; but 
 His stay, at this time, was short, for He presently set out on His first 
 Passover journey to Jerusalem. On His return. He appears to have made 
 His abode, as often as He was in the town, in the house of Peter, who 
 lived with his brother Andrew and his mother-in-law. It had a court-yard 
 before it, and was on the shore of the Lake, but it was, at best, only the 
 home of a rough-handed fisherman's household.
 
 314 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 VISIT TO JERUSALEM, 
 
 r I 1HE choice of Capernatim by Jesus as His future centre was sigui- 
 I -*- ficant. John had chosen the " terrible wilderness," with its " vipers 
 I and scorpions and drought." Jesus selected the district spoken of as " the 
 I garden of God," and "Paradise." John had lived aimidst the silence of 
 desolation; Jesus came to a centre of business and travel, to live amidst 
 men. John kept equally aloof from priest, prince, or governor, from Rome 
 , a.,nd from Jerusalem ; Jesus settled in a garrison town, noted for business 
 J and near Tiberias, with its Iduniean prince, the future murderer of the 
 BajDtist, and its gay courtiers. The contrast marked the vital difference 
 between His work and that of His herald. He was to wear no prophet's 
 mantle like John, but the simple dress of other men : to lay no stress on 
 fasts, to enforce no isolation from any class, for He came to all men irre- 
 spective of rank or nation. 
 
 Jesus had come, in fact, to preach a Gospel of which the glorious pano- 
 rama around Him was the fit emblem. The "old wine" of Judaism, 
 which had in a measure characterized the spirit of John, was to be replaced 
 by the "new wine of the kingdom of God." John had sought to establish 
 that kingdom anew, on a Jewish foundation, by trying to blend together 
 the spiritual and the external. While breaking away in some respects from 
 the old theocracy, he had sought to build up a new outward constitution 
 for Israel alone, and had imposed it, v/ith its burden of fastings, washings, 
 and endless legal requirements, in j^art, on the nation at large, and in all 
 its severity, on himself and his disciples. He had proposed to heal the 
 wounds of mankind by an unnatural withdrawal from the world, and by 
 the austerities of ascetic observance. For this religion of endless, hope- 
 less struggle after legal purity, which carried with it no balm for the 
 heart, and enforced morbid isolation, Jesus, by His settling in CaiDernaum, 
 substituted tliat of peace and joy, and of a healthy intercourse with man- 
 kind and citizenship in the great world. The religion of John was 
 national, local, and unsatisfying, and marked by the spirit of caste; that 
 of Jesus offered the splendid contrast of a faith which rose high over all 
 that had hitherto been known. Suited alike for the peasant and the 
 prince, it cared nothing for outward position or the changes of states or 
 nationality, but sought only to meet the wants and longings of man. in 
 the inner infinite world of the heart and spirit, which no Herod could 
 reach. Recognising all good, wherever found, it gladly drew to itself all 
 that was true and pure, and rejoiced to ally itself with the gifts which 
 dignify human nature. The friend of man, it saw in every soul a pearl, 
 hidden or visible, and ennobled every honourable human calling by enlist- 
 ing it in the service of God. It lifted men above care for the world or 
 inclination to seek it, because it was not a religion of outward forms, of 
 harsh legalities, or unnatural self -infliction and isolation, but the religion 
 of peace and joy, in reconciliation with God and the calm of jarring nature 
 within — a religion which gave calmness amidst all want, and reflected the
 
 VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 315 
 
 untroubled image of heaven in the soul, amidst suffering and trial — a 
 religion which laid the agitations and cares of the bosom to rest, by the 
 pledge of Divine love and pity. The sweet faucy of the Portuguese 
 mariner, who, after rounding Cape Horn, amidst storm and terrors, found 
 that the ocean on which he had entered, lay as if hushed asleep before 
 him, and ascribed its calm to the glittering form of the southern cross 
 shining down on it, was to be turned into fact, in the stillness of the 
 hitherto troubled soul under the light of the Star of Bethlehem. 
 
 The stay of Jesus in Capernaum at this time was very short. He had 
 resolved to attend the Passover, and only waited till it was time to do so. 
 No details have been left us of this earliest ministry, but it could hardly 
 have been encouraging, for even at a later date its recollections waked 
 painful thoughts. The determination to carry His message beyond the 
 narrow and ungracious circle of Capernaum, and the towns around, to a 
 wider sphere, would be only strengthened hj this result. Jerusalem, with 
 its schools and Temple, was the place fitted beyond all others for His 
 working with effect. He did not wish to bo openly recognised as the 
 Messiah as yet, but it was imperative now, at the opening of His ministry, 
 that he should visit the great centre and heart of the nation, and unosten- 
 tatiously open His great commission. The whole country looked to Jeru- 
 salem as its religious capital, and an impression made there would react 
 everywhere. 
 
 The mouth of April, on the eve of the 15th of which the Passover was 
 eaten, was the bright spring month of the year. The plains were covered 
 with rich green, for it was the "caring month," and the grey hills lit up 
 with red anemones, rock roses, red and j'ellow, the convolvulus, marigold, 
 wild geranium, red tulip, and a hundred other glories, for it was the 
 "month of flowers." The cuckoo, unseen, as here, was heard around: our 
 thrush and sweet-voiced blackbird flew off at the approach of a passer by : 
 the voice of the turtle was heard in the land : the sona; of the lark flooded 
 a thousand acres of upper air, and the pastures were alive with flocks and 
 herds. The roads to Jerusalem were already crowded when the month 
 began. Flocks of sheep, goats, and cattle from Bashan, daily passed over 
 the fords of the Jordan, towards the Holy City, and shepherds with their 
 flocks, from " the pastures of the wilderness," between Bethany on the 
 Mount of Olives, and the Dead Sea, or from the south country stretching 
 aAvay from Bethlehem, wore in great excitement to bring their charge 
 safely to the Temple market, where one hundred thousand lambs, alone, 
 were needed, besides thousands of sheep and oxen. The roads and bridges 
 on the main lines of travel through the whole country had been repaired ; 
 all tombs whitewashed, to guard those coming to the feast from defilement, 
 by unconscious approach to them : the fields examined, to weed out what- 
 ever illegal mixtures of plants defiled the land : and the springs and wells 
 cleansed for the wants of the pilgrims, no less than to secure their legal 
 purity. 
 
 Jerusalem was in its glory. The Avhole population was astir from the 
 earliest morning, to enjoy the cool of the day and the excitements of the 
 Beason. The hills of Moab were hardly purple with the dawn before the
 
 316 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 Temple courts were crowded, and by the time the sun rose from behind 
 the Mount of Olives, leaving the morning clouds to float off and lose 
 themselves in the deep valley of the Dead Sea, the business of the day 
 had fully begun. The golden roofs and marble walls of the Temple re- 
 flected a dazzling brightness ; the King's Pool, beyond the Tyropoeon, 
 seemed molten silver, and the palms, cypresses, olives, and figs, of the 
 palace gardens, and among the mansions of the rich on Zion and round the 
 city, bent in the soft air. The concourse at the hour of morning prayer 
 was immense, but it grew even greater as the day advanced. The streets 
 were blocked by the crowds from all parts, who had to make their way to 
 the Temple, past flocks of sheep and droves of cattle, pressing on in the 
 sunken middle part of each street reserved for them, to prevent contact 
 and defilement. Sellers of all possible wares beset the pilgrims, for the 
 great feasts were, as has been said, the harvest time of all trades at Jeru- 
 salem, just as, at Mecca, even at this day, the time of the great concourse 
 of worshippers at the tomb of the Prophet, is that of the busiest trade 
 among the merchant pilgrims, who form the caravans from all parts of 
 the Mohammedan world. 
 
 Inside the Temple space, the noise and pressure were, if possible, worse. 
 Directions were posted up to keep to the right or the left, as in the densest 
 thoroughfares of London. The outer court, which others than Jews might 
 enter, and which was, therefore, known as the Coui't of the Heathen, was, 
 in ircivt, covered with pens for sheep, goats, and cattle, for the feast and 
 the thank-offerings. Sellers shouted the merits of their beasts, sheep 
 bleated, and oxen lowed. It was, in fact, the great yearly fair of Jeru- 
 salem, and the crowds added to the din and tumult, till the services in the 
 neighbouring courts were sadly disturbed. Sellers of doves, for poor 
 women coming for purification, from all parts of the country, and for othersj 
 had a space set apart for them. Indeed, the sale of doves was, in great 
 measure, secretly, in the hands of the priests themselves : Kaunas, the 
 high priest, especially, gaining great profits from his dove-cots on Mount 
 Olivet. The rents of the sheep and ca,ttle pens, and the profits on the 
 doves, had led the priests to sanction the incongruity of thus turning the 
 Temple itself into a noisy market. ISTor was this all. Potters pressed on 
 the pilgrims their clay dishes and ovens for the Passover Lamb ; hundreds 
 of traders recommended their wares aloud; shops for wine, oil, salt, and 
 all else needed for sacrifices, invited customers, and, in addition, persons 
 going across the city with all kinds of burdens, shortened their journey 
 by crossing the Temple grounds. The provision for paying the tribute, 
 levied on all, for the support of the Temple, added to the distraction. On 
 both sides of the east Temple gate, stalls had for generations been per- 
 mitted for changing foreign money. From the fifteenth of the preceding 
 month money-changers had been allowed to set up their tables in the city, 
 and from the twenty-first— or twenty days before the Passover— to ply 
 their trade in the Temple itself. Purchasers of materials for offer- 
 ings paid the amount at special stalls, to an officer of the Temple, and 
 received a leaden cheque for which they got what they had bought from 
 the seller. Large sums, moreover, were changed, to be cast, as free offer-
 
 VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 317 
 
 ings, into one of the tliirtccn cliests wliicli formed the Temple treasury. 
 Every Jew, no matter how poor, was, in addition, required to pay yearly 
 a half-shekel — about eightecnpeuce — as atonement money for his soul, and 
 for the support of the Temple. As this would not be received except in 
 a uative coin, called the Temple shekel, which was not generally current, 
 strangers had to change their Roman, Greek, or Eastern money, at the 
 stalls of the money-changers, to get the coin required. The trade gave 
 ready means for fraud, which was only too common. Five per cent, ex- 
 change was charged, but this was indefinitely increased by tricks and 
 chicanery, for which the class had evei'y where earned so bad a name, that, 
 like the publicans, their witness would not be taken before a court. 
 
 Jesus was greatly troubled by this monstrous desecration of His Father's 
 house. He was a young unknown man, and a Galilaean : He had no formal 
 authority to interfere, for the Temple arrangements were under the priests 
 alone, but the sight of such abuses, in a place so holy, roused His inmost 
 spirit. Entering the polluted Temple space, and gazing round on the 
 tumult and manifold defilements. He could not remain imjjassive. Hastily 
 tying togetlier some small cords, and advancing to the sellers of the sheep 
 and oxen, He commanded them to leave the Temple, with their property, 
 at once, and drove them and their beasts out of the gates. The sellers of 
 doves were allowed to take their cages away, but thej, too, had to leave. 
 The money-changers fared worst, as they deserved. Their tables were 
 overturned, and they themselves expelled. After long years the Temple 
 was once more sacred to God. 
 
 That one man should have effected such an amazing act may have been 
 due, as St. Jerome says, " to the starry light which shone from His eyes, 
 and to the Divine majesty which beamed from His features," but it is not 
 necessary to suppose such a miraculous aid. The weakness of a guilty 
 conscience on the one side, and the grandeur of a supreme enthusiasm on 
 the other, account for it. All were under a spell for the moment. It was 
 an act such as Mattathias or Judas Maccabceus might have done, and 
 prophet-like as it was, in such a place, and in such a cause, its unique 
 heroism secured its triumph. 
 
 The authorities who were responsible for the abuse so astoundingly 
 corrected, were no less paralyzed than the multitude at large, by the 
 lofty zeal for God shown thus strangely. Eules of a strictness hitherto 
 unknown were ere long announced, and, for the moment, put in force, 
 though, three years later, things had become as bad as ever. No one 
 could henceforth go up to " the hill of the Lord " with a staff in his hand^ 
 or with his shoes" on his feet, or with money in his girdle, or with a sack 
 on his shoidder, or even with dust on his feet, and no one might carry a 
 burden of any kind through the Temple, or even spit within the holy jire- 
 cincts. It was felt that religion had received a deadly injury by the evils 
 against which the Galila)an stranger had thus signally protested, and a 
 vain effort was made to restore the prestige they themselves had so fatally 
 injured. 
 
 It was wholly in keeping with His office to act as Jesus had done. As His 
 Father's House, the Temple was supremely under His care, and He only
 
 318 THE LIFE OP CHEIST. 
 
 exercised His rights and duties as the Messiah, in cleansing it as He did. 
 It was a sign and commencement of the spiritual cleansing He came to 
 inaugurate : a note struck which disclosed the character of His future 
 work. Zechariah had said that in the days of the Messiah " the trader 
 would no more be in the House of Jehovah," and thus even the prophets, 
 whom the nation honoured, seemed to endorse His act. 
 
 The priests could say nothing condemnatory, but coidd only raise the 
 question why He should have taken it upon Him to assume authority which 
 they claimed. They were irritated beyond bounds, and doubtless indulged 
 their scorn at a "prophet," who took on Himself the duties of the Temple 
 police. Yet the people, by their silence, showed that they approved the 
 act, though it implied condemnation of the high priest and his colleagues, 
 and had attacked a custom sanctioned by age, established by formal 
 authority, and identified with the interests of the Temple and its services. 
 The crowds of pilgrims also honoured the act of the young GalilEBan, of 
 whom strange rumours had reached them from the Jordan ; instinctively 
 feeling that it was right. Jesus had made His entrance on public notice, 
 in a way that struck the jiopular imagination, — as a true prophet, who 
 witnessed fearlessly for God, against the desecration of His house. The 
 feeling towards Him was half enthusiastic, half respectful ; His enemies 
 were confused and paralyzed. He was the valiant soldier of the Lord of 
 Hosts, and it might have seemed as if the way to an easy triumph were 
 to be expected forthwith. 
 
 But He and the people had wholly different conceptions of the office of 
 the Messiah. He had acted as He had done from no personal end. His 
 discijiles saw that it was consuming zeal for His Father's glory, that had 
 animated Him ; a welling up of holy indignation. He had exercised the 
 prophet's office, of striking for the true, and the pure ; a right which has 
 been used in all ages by lofty natures, when instituted means and the low 
 morality of the times, fail to stem growing corruption. Such an act could 
 not be done, without overpowering, unreflecting earnestness, and zeal 
 kindled into a flame, but this Divine earnest zeal was not unworthy of the 
 purest, for without it, in fallen times, nothing great can be done. Yet He 
 was the Prince of Peace. It was not His nature to strive, or to make His 
 voice heard in the streets. To have taken the tide of popular feeling at 
 the full, would have led Him to triumphs for which He had no desire, and 
 would have been fatal to His views, instead of advancing them. Numbers 
 were, perhaps, willing to have believed that He might be the Messiah, had 
 He announced Himself as such, but the Law had been given of old amidst 
 thunderings and lightnings, and they expected the Kingdom of the Messiah 
 to be proclaimed with equal sublimity. Unostentatious illustrations of 
 Divine power, such as healing the sick, opening the eyes of the blind, or 
 the ears of the deaf, were not enough. They desired public and national 
 miracles, which would glorify Israel and astonish the world. But it was 
 no part of His plan to attract the wonder of the crowd, or to minister to 
 national pride, or inaugurate a dispensation of fear or force. His Kingdom 
 was in the hearts of men. not in their outward suffrages ; in the calm 
 realms of truth, not in those of political strife.
 
 VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 319 
 
 The authorities could take no violent measures, and contented them- 
 Belves with asking Him for some " sign," to justify His act by its Divine 
 authority, and incidentally reveal His claim on their homage, if, perchance, 
 He might prove the Messiah. The question must have raised that of His 
 supreme right as consecrated Son of God, and involved the condemnation 
 of those by Avliom such a state of things had been allowed. Wh}^ had 
 they, the appointed guardians of the Temple, been so powerless or neg- 
 ligent against such desecration ? If they had thus failed, who but the 
 Messiah alone, could cleanse the sanctuary, not partly, and for a time, but 
 perfectly, and for ever ? Ho answered them, therefore, as their Rabbis 
 were wont to do, with an enigmatical sentence, which He left them to 
 unriddle as they could. " Destroy this Temple," said He, doubtless point- 
 ing as He did so, to His person — that Temple of God, pure and sacred 
 bej'ond all others — " and in three days I will raise it up." The sound of 
 the words to a Jew, and their apparent meaning, were alike audaciovis. 
 He was standing amid the long and lofty marble arcades of the sacred 
 building ; amidst its courts, leaved with costliest stones, and rising terrace 
 above terrace ; its vast spaces, built up with incredible labour and equal 
 magnificence from the valley, hundreds of feet below ; its sanctuar)' ablaze 
 with gold ; its wonderful gates of silver and gold and Corinthian brass, 
 which were the national pride. The very existence of the nation was 
 identified with the inviolability of the Temple. It had been already build- 
 ing for forty-six years, and was not yet finished, for eighteen thousand 
 workmen were still employed on some incomplete parts of it thirty years 
 after this, and were paid off when their work was done, only a few years 
 before the destruction of the city. The passionate fanaticism for a struc- 
 ture so splendid, and so bound up with the hojies and pride of the nation, 
 was extreme. It seemed to them under the special protection of Jehovah. 
 Antiochus Epiphanes, its great enemy, had perished miserably and shame- 
 fully in Persia. Crassus, who had jaluudered its treasures, had fallen with 
 his army, amidst the thirsty sands of the desert. Pompey, who had 
 intruded into the Holy of Holies, had been murdered by an Egyptian 
 centurion, and his headless trunk had been left exposed on the strand of 
 Egypt. To touch the Temple was, in the eyes of the Jew, to incur the 
 vengeance of the Almighty. Perverting the answer of Jesl^s, therefore, 
 into an allusion to the building which they revered with such a zealous 
 idolatry, they tauntingly reminded Him of the years it had taken to build, 
 and scouted His supposed proposal to destroy and restore it so quickly. 
 
 No utterance ever fell from the lips of Jesus, of which He did not foresee 
 the full effect, and this answer, as He knew, was a veiled anticipation of 
 His earthly end. The cry that the Temple was in danger would at any 
 moment rouse the whole race to revenge the insult with the fury of 
 despair, or perish in the attempt. The resentment felt at such words, 
 may therefore be judged. Three years later it was by their perversion 
 that the high priests sought His death, and they were coarsely flung as a 
 taunt against Him, when He hung on the Cross. ISTor were they forgotten 
 even afterwards, for they were made an aggravation of the charges against 
 the first martyr, Stephen, as His follower.
 
 320 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 But tliey meant something of deepest significance to the Jews them- 
 selves. Though, doubtless, in their direct import a concealed announce- 
 ment of His own death and resurrection, they had wider applications. 
 " Your whole religion," they implied, " in as far as it rests on this Temple, 
 is corrupt and sunken, but He is already here, who, when that Temple 
 passes away, as pass away it must, will restore it in unspeakably greater 
 glory, and His doing so will be the sign He gives." All this lay in His 
 veiled sentence. " Do you really wish a sign from Me, of my Divine 
 authority over tliis Temple ? You shall have the highest. Destroy this 
 Temple, which will surely one day fall, though, while it stands, I wish it 
 to be pure and worthy : destroy it, if you choose, and with it let all your 
 corrupted religion perish : I shall, presently, rebuild it again, with far 
 greater glory than it can now boast, for this Temple is the desecrated and 
 fallen work of men's hands, but Mine will be pure : a Temple of the 
 religion of SjDirit and truth, which will be established by My resurrection 
 on the third day, and will be immortal and indestructible." 
 
 In the answer of Jesus, indeed, lay, already the whole future of His 
 Church. The history of His life and of His work is linked to this earliest 
 utterance. The magnificent temple He that day cleansed was soon to be 
 destroyed, mainly through the guilt of those who sought so fanatically to 
 preserve it, with all its abuses. But, even before it rose in flames from 
 the torch of the Roman soldier, or fell, stone from stone, before his tools, 
 another temple, far more wonderful, had risen silently, in the spirits of 
 men, to take its place— a temple, pure and eternal, which He had now 
 dimly foreshadowed, at this first moment of His public career. Yet, even 
 the Church was in no such high sense the Temple of God as the mysterious 
 person of Jesus Himself — the holiest tabernacle of God amongst men ever 
 vouchsafed, the true Shekinah, the visible incarnation of the Divine. 
 After the crucifixion, and the resurrection, the exact fulfilment of His 
 words, in these two great events, struck the imagination of the discijiles 
 more than any other meaning they might have. " He spoke of the Temple 
 of His body." True in other senses, it was pre-eminently so in this. 
 
 With such an old prophet-like first appearance, followed up, as it was, 
 by acts of miraculous power, equal, no doubt, in character and greatness, 
 to the examples elsewhere recorded in the Gospels, it is no wonder to learn 
 that many believed on Him. Yet He received no one into the circle of 
 His closer personal following from those thus impressed. No Scribe or 
 Rabbi, no wealthy citizen, not even a common townsman of Jerusalem, was 
 called to follow Him. " He did not trust Himself to them," nor honour 
 any of them with the confidence He had shown in some of His Galiltean 
 disciples. Nor did He relax this caution at any future time ; for though 
 He gained many friends in Judea, as wo discover incidentally. He sur- 
 rounded Himself with Galilasans to the end of His life. The people of 
 Jerusalem contrasted unfavourably with the simpler peasants of the north : 
 they were curious and excitable, rather than deep and earnest, and the 
 wisdom of the schools, which flourished especially under the shadow of 
 the Temple, was pre-eminently unfitted to understand Him, or ally itself 
 closely with Him. The keen glance of Jesus saw this from the first.
 
 VISIT TO JERUSALEM. 32i 
 
 There were, doubtless, many of the rich and influential men of Jerusalem 
 who felt the shortcomings of the prevailing school-wisdom and priestly 
 system, and, fretting uneasily under the rule of a Herod, or of a Roman 
 governor, were well inclined to join a true Israelitish king ; many, possibly, 
 who even secretly admired Jesus, and were ready to recognise Him as the 
 Messiah, as soon as they could do so safely. But John, who was himself a 
 Galilfean, and knew that Jesus had made only Galileans His confidential 
 friends, reveals in his sententious epigrammatical way. His estimate of 
 such doubtful support. " He did not trust Himself to them because He 
 knew all men, and because He needed not that any should bear witness 
 respecting Him, as man." A cheerful witness to Him as the Sou of God, 
 He always welcomed, when it came freely ; but as to the other — He kne^r 
 men's hearts. He could see that they were willing to honour Him as a 
 human king, and that, only from His wondei'ful works and miracles, and 
 they, unmistakably, exjjected a human kingdom at His hands. To rule, 
 as a man over men, it would have been needful to seek the support of the 
 powerful, who would lend themselves for personal ends, and act on mere 
 human maxims. But such men would be no counsellors, helpers, or 
 servants in founding and spreading the Kingdom of Truth. 
 
 Among the upper class of citizens, however, there was one, the repre- 
 sentative of many whose names ai'e unrecorded, who was deeply moved by 
 the words and acts of the young Galitean. He bore the Greek name 
 Nicodemus, and was a ruler, or foremost man, in the religious world of 
 'Jerusalem, a member of its governing class, and, in sentiment and party, 
 a Pharisee. He was, moreover, wealthy, and, thus, in many respects, one 
 whose support, at such a time, would have been eagerly grasped at, had 
 Jesus proposed to found a kingdom in which the aids of human expediency 
 were admitted, as in political systems. He was a man of advanced years 
 and high position, and might, no doubt, hfive done good service to Christ's 
 worldly interests among the influential classes, and have even heljied 
 towards a coalition of the priests and Pharisees with Him, had His aims 
 been national and religio-political, like theirs. There was, inevitably, a 
 strong prejudice in Jerusalem, against a movement which had begun in 
 Galilee and was supported by Galilteans, and Nicodemus might have helped 
 to counteract it. It was a condition of his connection with Jesus, however 
 that it should be secret. Constitutionally timid, he could not brave the 
 social proscrijition and ridicule which would follow an open adherence ; 
 for, though no overt hostility to the New Teacher had yet broken out in 
 the class to which he belonged, it was clear that its doing so was only a 
 question of time. He was honest, and earnest, but could not yet make the 
 sacrifice an open alliance demanded. Indeed, his caution clung to him to 
 the end of Christ's life, for in the only two instances in which his name 
 re-appears, his weak indirectness is plainly shown. At a later period, 
 when the rulers had determined to use violence against Jesus, we find him 
 trying to turn them aside from their purpose, by a general question which 
 did not commit himself, and when all was over, it was not till he had caught 
 spirit enough from the example of one of his own class, Joseph of Arima- 
 thea, that he ventured to own his reverence for the dead Saviour, by 
 
 Y
 
 322 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 bringing his bountiful gifts of spices to embalm Him. At his first inter- 
 view, he did not venture to visit Jesus openly, but came to Him by night. 
 
 As a Eabbi, Nicodemus was necessarily skilled in the subtle expositions 
 of the Law for which his oi'der was famous, and must have been familiar 
 with the Scriptures throughout, but he had been trained in the artificial 
 explanations of the schools, and was profoundly unconscious of their deeper 
 meaning. Like others, he supposed that the Messiah would set up a 
 theocracy distinguished by zealous fulfilment of the Law ; every Israelite, 
 as such, forming a member of it. Greeting Jesus as one whom he, and 
 others in his position, acknowledged to be a Eabbi, he opened the interview 
 by a compliment, intended to lead to the point he had at heart. Any 
 question as to his own admission to the Messiah's kingdom had not crossed 
 his mind. The traditions of his brother Rabbis had taught him that while 
 " the nations of the world would be as the burning of a furnace in the 
 great Day of Judgmeiit, Israel, as such, would be saved ; " that " there was 
 a part allotted to all Israel in the world to come," or, in other words, in 
 the kingdom of the Messiah. " God had sanctified Israel to Hiniself for 
 ever," and made every Jew as such, on a footing, as to His love and favour, 
 with "all the Angels of the Presence, and all the Angels of Praise, and 
 with all the Holy Angels that stand before Him." Hence, he only wished 
 to know the duties required of him as a member of the Messianic king- 
 dom, which Jesus appeared to be sent from God to set vip. Christ, in an 
 instant, saw into the speaker's heart. So far from making any attempt to 
 win him, or from abating His demands, as a compromise in favour of one 
 whose support might be so advantageous, He cut him short by a statement 
 which must have thrown his whole thoughts into confusion. Trusting 
 implicitly to his being a Jew, as a Divine title to citizenship in the new 
 theocracy, and thinking only of formal acts by which he might show his 
 devotion, and increase his claim to the favour of God, liero and hereafter, 
 he is met by an announcement that neither national descent, nor the utter- 
 most exactness of Pharisaic observance, nor any good works, however 
 great, availed at all as such, to secure entrance into the kingdom of God. 
 He had supposed Jesus a Eabbi, and had expected to hear some new legal 
 precepts, but is told that not only has he no title whatever, as a Jew, to 
 share in the new kingdom, but that he cannot hope to earn one. Jewish 
 theology knew nothing higher than an exact equivalent in good or evil, 
 for every act. " An eye for an eye," both here and hereafter, was its only 
 conception. A legal precisian had a right to heaven ; the neglect of Levi- 
 tical righteousness shut its gates on the soul. 
 
 Jesus broadly told him that his whole conceptions were fundamentally 
 wrong. " Every man, whatever his legal standing, must be born again, if 
 he would see the kingdom of God. To do so is not a question of outward 
 acts, legal, or moral, but of their motive." The idea of being "born 
 again " should not have been incomprehensible to a Jewish Eabbi, for it 
 was a saying of the Scribes that " a proselyte is like a child new born," 
 and " circumcision of the heart," and the " creating a clean heart and 
 renewing a right spirit," are expressions that must have been familiar to 
 him in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. But the full meaning of
 
 VISIT TO JERUSALEM. ■ 323 
 
 sncli terius had been lost in tlio prevailing externalism. He took the 
 words in their literal sense. In his perplexity, he supposed that what was 
 demanded was in some way connected with his nationality, which, he 
 assumed, already opened an unquestioned entrance for hini into the 
 theocracy. 
 
 Jesus saw his embarrassment, and forthwith explained His meaning 
 more fully. '"The kingdom of God," He told him, '•' was none the less a 
 true kingdom that it stood aloof from politics, and had none of the out- 
 ward characteristics of carthlj^ states. It had no civil judges, but it had 
 its laws, and by these all its su])jects would hereafter be tried, beyond the 
 grave. It had its conditions of acceptance, also, and these were, belief in 
 Himself as its Founder, Legislator, and future Judge, and open confession 
 of that belief by the rite of Baptism, with which Nicodemus was already 
 familiar, from the ministry of John. There could bo no admission of any 
 one, high or low, at a secret interview, to be followed by concealment of 
 the relation thus formed with Himself. There must be personal homage 
 and submission to Him, but it must also be frankly and publicly avowed." 
 
 Nor was Mcodemus left to siipposc that any outward and formal act, 
 even if inclusive of these demands, would alone suffice. Baptism was but 
 the symbol of a spiritual revolution so complete that it might well be 
 described as a new birth. All men were by nature sinful, and needed a 
 moral transformation, which would make them as naturally seek the pure 
 and holy as they had sought the opposite. Citizenship in His kingdom 
 was a gift of God Himself ; the re-creation of the moral nature by His 
 Spirit, through which the soul hungered after good, as, before, it had done 
 after sin. 
 
 Nov was ISTicodemus to wonder at such a statement. God's influence on 
 the heart was like the flowing wind — free, felt, and yet mysterious. It 
 came as it listed, its presence was felt by its results, but all besides was 
 beyond our knowledge. 
 
 Teaching so fundamentally different from all his previous ideas, and 
 involving conceptions so unique and sublime, was for the time incompre- 
 hensible. The startled listener could only mutter, " Hoav can these things 
 be ? " ISTicodemus, it seems very probable, was one of the chief men of the 
 religious world in Jerusalem, for the three officers of the Sanhedrim, 
 while it existed, were the President, the Yice-President, and the "Master," 
 or wise man, and Jesus appears to address him as " Master," in subdued 
 reproach at his perplexity. " Art thou," He asked, " the teacher," — well 
 known and recognised as such — the wise man — even by title, " and dost 
 not know these things ? I speak only what I know and have seen in the 
 eternal world, and you hesitate to believe Me. If I have told you thus of 
 what is matter of experience, and runs its course in the human heart 
 during this earthly life, and you think it incompreliensible, how will you 
 believe if I tell you the higher truths of the Kingdom — those heavenly 
 mysteries which concern the plan of God for the salvation of man ? No 
 other can reveal such matters, for no man has ever ascended to heaven 
 to learn them ; but I am He— the Messiah, foretold, as the Son of Man, by 
 your prophet Daniel — who have come down from heaven, and, even now,
 
 324 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 have there My peculiar home and seat. Let Me vouchsafe you some 
 glimpses of tlie true nature of My kingdom. I come not as a triumphant 
 earthly monarch, but to sufPer. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the 
 wilderness, to save those who believed in it, so must I be lifted up— how 
 you shall know hereafter— that all who believe in Me may not perish, but 
 have eternal life. I have come to carry o^^t, as a suffering Messiah, the 
 high purpose of God's eternal love for the salvation of man. 
 
 " You seek eternal life : it can be had only by believing on Me. He who 
 does so, has his reward even here, in the love, light, and peace which flow 
 from the gift of the Spirit, and are the earnest of future glory. I have not 
 come to judge men, for to judge would have been to condemn. I come to 
 save. They who reject Me are, indeed, judged and condemned already, 
 for when I, the Light, have come to them, they have shown their character 
 by preferring the darkness of sin. Men separate themselves into good 
 and evil, before God, by tlieir bearing towards Me. The evil wish not to 
 be disturbed, and to be let stay in moral darkness, to follow out their sin- 
 ful desires ; but he who seeks the truth comes to Me to have more light. 
 Thus, the evil stand self -condemned : the good rejoice in their growing 
 light, as a foretaste of heaven." 
 
 The astonishing originality of such language is altogether unique. At 
 His first appearance, though still a young man, without the sanction of 
 success, or the weight of position, or the countenance of the schools, Jesus 
 bears Himself, with calm unconsciousness of effort, as altogether superior 
 to His visitor. A born Jew, He speaks as the Lawgiver of a new theo- 
 cracy which He has come to found, in place of that of Moses, whom they 
 almost worshipped. He lays down conditioiis of unbending strictness, as 
 indispensable to an entrance into the new community thus to be estab- 
 lished, though He has nothing to offer but privation and self-denial, as 
 the earthly result of joining it. He moves at His ease amidst subjects 
 the most august and mysterious : demands the personal homage of those 
 who would enter His kingdom, and promises eternal life as the reward of 
 sincere accejitance of His claims. Repudiating the aids to which others 
 might have looked ; seeking no support from the powerful or from the 
 crowd, to facilitate His design ; He speaks of Himself, even now, when 
 obscure and alone, as a king, and shows a serene composure in extending 
 His royalty over even the souls of men. In the presence of a famous 
 Eabbi, he claims to be the light to which all men, without exception, must 
 come, who love the truth. His first utterance anticipates the highest 
 claims of His last. An humble Galilasan, easy of access, sympathetic, ob- 
 scure. He calmly announces Himself as the Son of Man, whose home is 
 heaven: as knowing the counsels of God from eternity: as the only-be- 
 gotten Son of the Eternal, and the arbiter of eternal life or death to the 
 world. It is idle to speak of any merely human utterances, even of the 
 greatest and best of our race, in the presence of such thoughts and words 
 as these : they are the voice of a higher sphere, though falling from tlie 
 lips of One who walked as a man amongst men.
 
 FROM JERUSALEM TO SAMARIA. 325 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 FIIOM: JERUSALEM TO SAMAUIA. 
 
 r I 1 HE stay of Jesus in Jerusalem was short, for He had corne up only 
 -■- to attend the Passover, and to open His Great Commission in the 
 religious centre of the nation, before the vast throngs of pilgrims fre- 
 quenting the feast. ISTor were the results disappointing, for " many be- 
 lieved in His name, when they saw the miracles which He did " during 
 the week. With the departure of the multitudes, however, He also left, to 
 enter, with His disciples, on His first wide circuit of preaching and teach- 
 ing ; for, though a beginning had already been made in Galilee, it had 
 been on a much smaller scale. 
 
 The district thus favoured embraced the whole of Judea, which extended, 
 on the south, to the edge of the wilderness at Bccrshcba, far below Hebron; 
 to the lowlands of the Philistine plain, on the west ; to the line of the 
 Jordan and the Dead Sea, on the east, and, on the north, to Akrabbim, the 
 frontier village of Samaria, which lay among the hills, twenty-five miles, 
 as the crow flies, from Jerusalem. We have the authority of the Apostle 
 Peter, who very likely shared the journey, that it extended " throughout 
 all Judea," but we have no record of the towns and villages thus early 
 favoured with the Message of the New Kingdom. 
 
 How long the tour lasted we do not know ; but it must have occupied 
 some months, for He "tarried " from time to time at different points. Ho 
 Himself preaching and teaching, and His disciples baptizmg the converts 
 gained. It was not fitting that Jesus should Himself administer the rite 
 which admitted citizens to His spiritual kingdom. Baptism, which had 
 been introduced by John as a symbol of repentance and spiritual renewal, 
 in expectation of the coming Messiah, had now acquired the far grander 
 significance of a profession of faith in Jesus, as the Messiah already come. 
 John's baptism had implied a vow to live in the strict and painful Jewish 
 asceticism of washings, fasts, and legal observances ; that of Jesus trans- 
 formed this life into one of Divine liberty and loving joy. Tlie material 
 baptism, moreover, was but the symbol, and might well be left to His 
 discij^les. Himself retaining the far grander ministry of the dispensation 
 of the Spirit, which cleansed the moral nature, as water did the body. 
 They had the emblem : He, as became a King, kept in His own hands the 
 substance and reality. To preach the Gospel, not to baptize, was hereafter, 
 even in St. Paul's view, the special commission of an Apostle. Humbler 
 agencies could be left to perform the rite : to the higher office Jesus 
 devoted His higher rank. 
 
 The introduction of baptism at the beginning of our Lord's ministry, is 
 mentioned only by St. John. It may be that this is simply an instance of 
 the omissions of the Evangelists, and that careful examination v\'ould find 
 indirect indications that it not merely began with the opening of Christ's 
 ministi-y, but continued, throughout, till the close. Yet, both St. Matthew 
 and St. Mark mention the command given by Jesus, immediately before 
 His ascension, to baptize all nations, without any indication of its being
 
 32G THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 tlie continuance of an existing custom, rather than the reintroduction of 
 what had been for a time in abeyance. Possibly, the extension of the rite 
 to all nations, may have been the special reason of its being thus promin- 
 ently noticed; but, more probably, the opposition of the ecclesiastical 
 authorities, which broke out into active hostility as soon as the new move- 
 ment grew popular, and forced Jesus to leave Judea, made it necessary to 
 disarm opposition by suspending the practice. 
 
 The ecclesiastical world of the day — priests, elders, and scribes— had 
 rejected the mission of John. They had inquired into his claims, attended 
 his preaching, and held intercourse with his disciples, but they had not 
 been baptized. They "rejected the counsel of God against themselves," 
 and even went so far, in order to discredit John with the multitude, as to 
 insinuate that he "had a devil." His real offence was having stood aloof 
 from them, the established religious authorities ; and he had shocked their 
 self-complacency, and impeached their theology, by declaring the worth- 
 lessness, before God, of mere nationality. But Jesus was already treading 
 in the same steps, and had shown even greater independence of the priests 
 and Kabbis, in His acts and teachings ; in His cleansing the Temple, and 
 in His discourse with Nicodemus. Before long, moreover. His movement 
 assumed greater importance than that of John, and threatened to draw 
 the whole nation from allegiance to the dignitaries of Jerusalem. The 
 fate of John, moreover, was perhaps, in great part, due to his being under 
 official censure, and it is not improbable, if Salim were in Judea, or even 
 in Samaria, as many suppose, that the machinations of the authorities had 
 contributed to his arrest, and to his being handed over to Antipas. He 
 had fled for safety to the west side of the Jordan, to be tinder Eoman law ; 
 but it is wholly in keeping with Pilate's treacherous nature to believe, 
 that in his dread of the priests and Rabbis, the Roman governor consented 
 to seize the prophet, and deliver him up to death, as he afterwards did 
 with Jesus Himself. Having such a catastrophe in mind, it would have 
 been opposed to the calm prudence with which Jesus at all times acted, to 
 have sought the publicity and excitement soon developed in connection 
 with his early baptismal gatherings. 
 
 It is a question, besides, whether the official opposition, which made 
 any action inexpedient that tended to agitate the public mind, did not, 
 also, compel delay in the outward organization of the new communion 
 which Jesus came to found. His spiritual kingdom could be proclaimed, 
 its laws and privileges made known, and citizens quietly gained as dis- 
 ciples, but their final enrolment as a distinct society would likely have 
 resiilted in the instant arrest of their Leader. The air was too full of 
 political rumours, in connection with a national Messiah, to have made that 
 organization practicable while Jesus lived, which was at once announced 
 after His death. If this were so, baptism, as the symbol of entrance into 
 the New Society, might be well deferred till the Church was actually 
 begun, on the day of Pentecost. 
 
 The burden of Christ's preaching, while journeying throughout Judea, 
 was, no doubt, the same as that of His Galiltean ministry a little later, 
 and as that of John— "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."
 
 FROM JERUSALEM TO SAMARIA. 327 
 
 The time had uot yet come for His openly proclaiming Himself as the 
 Messiah, though He acted from the first as such, -without formally assum- 
 ing the title. To have done so would have arrested His work at once, 
 while His acts and words, without compromising Him with the authorities, 
 were such as forced men, and even the spirits He cast out, to own His 
 true dignity. Indeed, the very nature of a spiritual kingdom like His, 
 founded necessarily only on the free convictions of men, not on assertion 
 or authority, demanded this reticence. The heart of man, which was to be 
 the seat of His empire, could he won only by the spiritual attractions 
 of His life and words. Faith and loving obedience could only spring from 
 sympathy with the truth and goodness His whole existence displayed, and 
 this sympathy must be spontaneous in each new disciple, and was often of 
 slow attainment. The kingdom, to use His own illustrations, must grow 
 from almost unperceived beginnings, in slow development, like the 
 mustard seed, and spread by silent and unseen advance, like leaven. It 
 was, in its very nature, to come " without observation" — unmarked— for 
 it was not political, like earthly kingdoms, but the- invisible reign of truth 
 in the souls of men — a growth of opinion — a kingdom not of this world. 
 
 In this opening period John still continued his great preparatory work. 
 He had crossed from the eastern to the western side of Jordan, and was 
 baptizing at Enon, near Salim — a place the position of which is not 
 positively known. He had, apparently, expected Jesus to begin His work 
 as the Messiah, by an open assumption of the title, and seems to have been 
 at a loss to account for a comparative privacy so different from his 
 anticipations. The idea of a great national movement, with Jesus at its 
 head, was natural to him, nor does he seem to have realized that the 
 sublimest self-proclamation our Lord could make was by the still small 
 voice of His Divine life and words. He was waiting calmly for a signal to 
 retire, which had not yet been given. Nor was it a superfluous work to 
 continue to point the multitudes to the Lamb of God, and thus prepare 
 them, by the weight of a testimony so revered, for accepting Him to whom 
 He thus directed them. 
 
 Human nature, however, is always the same ; ready to show its weak- 
 ness, even in connection with what is most sacred. The grand humility 
 of John — inaccessible to a jealous thought — was contented to be a mere 
 voice, sending men away from himself to liis great successor. But his 
 followers were not, in all cases, so lowly, and occasion soon offered which 
 gave their feelings expression. A Jew, who had, apparently, attended 
 the ministry of both John and Jesus, had shown the common bias of his 
 race by getting into a discussion with some of John's disciples, about the 
 comparative value of their master's baptism as a means of purification, 
 perhaps both morally and Levitically, compared with tliat of Jesus. A 
 theological controversy between Jews, as between Christians, is dangerous 
 to the temper, and, indeed, the Rabbis denounced cpietness and composure 
 in such matters as a sign of relisrious indifference. Warmth and bitter- 
 ness were assumed to prove zeal for the Law. Hence, no doubt, there 
 was abundant heat and wrangling on an occasion like this, the whole 
 resulting in a feeling of irritation and jealousy on the part of the cham-
 
 323 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 pions of John, against One who had thus been set up as his rival. In this 
 spirit thc}^ returned to their master, and proceeded to relieve their minds 
 by telling him that He who was with him beyond Jordan, to whom he had 
 borne witness, and to whom he had thus given a standing and influence, 
 had Himself begun to baptize. It appeared like unfair rivalry, and was 
 creating just such a sensation as John had caused at first, for now all 
 were flocking to the nevf Kabbi, as, formerly, to the banks of the Jordan. 
 
 T]ie greatness of the Baptist could not have been shown more strikingly 
 than in his reply to a comjalaint so fitted to touch his personal sensibilities. 
 " You are wrong," said he, " in thinking thus of Him to whom you refer. 
 If He meet such success, it is given Him from God, for a man can receive 
 nothing except it have been given him from heaven. You can yourselves 
 bear witness that I said, ' I am not the Christ, but am sent before Him.' " 
 John was regarded by the nation at large as a prophet, a^nd, as such, ho 
 was venerated so greatly, that, even after his death, many explained the 
 miracles of Jesus by supposing that He was John, risen again from the 
 dead, clothed with the transcendent powers of the spirit world from which 
 he had returned. Later still, the ecclesiastical authorities were afraid the 
 people would stone them if they spoke of his baptism as merely human. 
 He was now the foremost man in the land, but his splendid humility 
 never for a moment deserted him. " He may make no kingly show," he 
 continued, " and may have raised no excitement, but He is far above me. 
 You know how the friend of the bride leads her home to the bridegroom — 
 how he goes before the choir of companions that escort her, and brings 
 her, with loud rejoicings, to her lord. I am only that friend, the Kingdom 
 of God is the bride, and Jesus the Heavenly Bridegroom. The proi^hets of 
 old have foretold the espousals of heaven and earth : they are fast ap- 
 proaching : the kingdom of the Messiah is even now at hand, and will 
 fulfil the promise. Let us be glad, and rejoice, and give honour to Him, 
 for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife has made herself 
 ready. The friend listens for the Bridegroom's voice, to obey His com- 
 mands, and promote His joy, and rejoices to hear it, when he has led the 
 bride to Him. My joy is fulfilled, in having stirred up the multitude to 
 flock to the ministrations of the Lamb of God, and I rejoice in His being 
 so near me that I seem to catch His voice. He must increase ; I must 
 decrease. I am but the morning star; He, the rising sun. He comes 
 from above, and is, thus, above all ; I am only a man like yourselves, of the 
 earth, and speak as a man, what I have been sent by God to utter. He is 
 the Messiah from heaven, and speaks what He has seen and heard in the 
 eternal world — speaks from His own direct knowledge. I only repeat 
 what may be revealed to me, here below. My mission is well-nigh over, 
 and I now only finish my testimony before I finally vanish. But, though 
 thus worthy of all honour, few receive His witness : it is an evil genera- 
 tion, that seeks a Messiah very different from the holy Messiah of God. 
 He who believes in Him glorifies the faithfulness of God in fulfilling His 
 promises to send salvation to man. Tor the Gospel He proclaims is bub 
 the utterance of the precious words of God the Father to our race, and, 
 thus, in believing His Son, we honour Him who sent Him. Prophets, and
 
 FROM JERUSALEM TO SAMARIA. 329 
 
 even I, the Baptist, receive tlic Spirit only in the measure God is pleased 
 to grant, but God pours out His gifts on Him without measure." 
 
 Such thoughts filled the speaker's heart with teuder adoration, which 
 embodied itself in closing words of wondrous sublimity. " You may well 
 believe on Him," said he, " for the Father has given all things into His 
 hand — eternal life and outer darkness. He has not only the Divine anoint- 
 ing of the Messiah, but the awful power. To be saved by the works of the 
 Law is, moreover, hopeless : faith in Him is the one Salvation. It is 
 momentous, therefore, that you receive Him, for to reject Him is to perish. 
 Blessed is he who believes in Him : he has, even now, the beginnings in 
 his soul. of the Divine life which survives death, and never dies. Woe to 
 him who will not hear His voice. He shall never see life ; but the wrath 
 of God will burn against him abidingly ! " 
 
 •Jesus had now remained in Judea about nine months, from tlie Pass- 
 over, in April, to the winter sowing time, in December or January. The 
 crowds that came to hear Him, though rarely to receive His " witness," 
 grew daily larger, and His fame spread far and near, even to Galilee. His 
 very success, however, in attracting numbers, made His retirement to 
 another district necessary, for in Judea He was under the keen and un- 
 friendly eyes of the bigoted religious world of Jerusalem, who saw in Him 
 a second rival, more dangarous than the Baptist. His bearing towards 
 them had been seen in the cleansing of the Temple, and His miracles were 
 likely to give Him even more power over the people than John had had, 
 and to lead them to a revolt from the legal slavery to Eabbinical rules, in 
 which the Jerusalem Scribes and Pha^risees held them. There had, as yet, 
 been no open hostility, but it was not in keeping with the spirit of Jesus 
 to provoke persecution. His hour had not yet come, and to brave danger 
 at present, when duty did not demand it, would have been contrary to His 
 whole nature. Hereafter, when duty called Him to do so. He would volun- 
 tarily come, not to Judea alone, but to Jerusalem, though He knew it 
 meant His death. 
 
 But, apart from the kindling jealousy of the Pharisees, the people them- 
 selves were sufficient explanation of the return of Jesus to Galilee. He 
 was no mere popularity hunter, flattered by the idle curiosity that drew 
 crowds to see what wonder He might perform. He attracted crowds, but 
 yet His mission, in the only light in which He regarded results, had been 
 little better than sowing on the waj'side, or the stony place, or among 
 thistles and thorns. He had made so few disciples, that John could speak 
 of them as none. The fame He had gained might serve Him elsewhere, 
 but He measured the claims of a locality on His ministrations, not by 
 the numbers who came to Him, but by the proportion won to God. 
 
 The direct road to Galilee ran through the half-heathen country of 
 Samaria, and this Jesus resolved to take, though men of His nation gener- 
 ally preferred the circuitous route by Perea, rather than pass through the 
 territory of a race they hated. It ran north from Jerusalem, past Bethel, 
 between the height of Libona on the left hand, and of Shiloh on the right, 
 entering Samaria at the south end of the beautiful valley, which, further 
 north, stretches past the foot of Mounts Gerizim and Ebal. He must have
 
 330 THE LIFE OP CHBIST. 
 
 started in the early morning, to reach Sychar by noon, and must have 
 Ijeen near the boundary to have done so at all, in the short morning of a 
 winter's day. The road was proverbially unsafe for Jewish passengers, 
 either returning from Jerusalem or going to it, for it passed through the 
 border districts where the fends of the two rival peoples raged most 
 fiercely. The paths among the hills of Akrabbim, leading into Samaria, 
 had often been wet with the blood of Jew or Samaritan, for they were the 
 scene of constant raids and forays, like our own border marches between 
 Wales or Scotland, in former days. It had been dangerous even in the 
 time of Hosea, eight hundred years before, but it was worse now. The 
 pilgrims from Galilee to the feasts were often molested, and sometimes 
 even attacked and scattered, with more or less slaughter; each act of 
 violence bringing s^jeedy reprisals from the population of Jerusalem and 
 Judea, on the one side, and of Galilee on the other ; the villages of the 
 border districts, as most easily reached, bearing the brunt of the feud iu 
 smoking cottages, and indiscriminate massacre of young and old. 
 
 The country, as He approached Samaritan territory, was gradually more 
 inviting than the hills of southern Judea. " Samaria," says Josephus, 
 " lies between Judea and Galilee. It begins at a village in the great plain 
 (of Esdraelon) called Ginea (Engannim), and ends at the district or 'to- 
 parch,' of Akrabbim, and is of the same character as Judea. Both coitu- 
 trics are made up of hills and valleys, and are moist for agriculture, 
 and very fruitful. They have abundance of trees (mostly long since cut 
 down), and are full of autumnal fruit, both wild and cultivated. They 
 are not naturally watered by many rivers, but dei'ive their chief moisture 
 from the rains, of which they have no want. As to the rivers they have, 
 their waters are exceedingly sweet. By reason, also, of the excellent 
 grass, their cattle yield more milk than those of other places, and both 
 countries show that greatest proof of excellence and jilenty — they are, each, 
 very full of people." In our da3's Samaria is more pleasant than Judea. 
 The limestone hills do not drink in the waters that fall on them, like those 
 of the south. Rich level stretches of black soil, flooded in the wet season, 
 form splendid pastures, which alternate, in the valleys, with fertile tracts 
 of corn-land, gardens, and orchards. Grape-vines, and many kinds of 
 fruit-trees, cover the warm slopes of the limestone hills, and groves of 
 olives and walnut crown their rounded tops. The meadows of Samaria 
 have always been famous. Even the prophets speak of the pastures on its 
 downs, and of the thickets of its hill-forests. As Josephus tells us, the 
 supply of rain was abundant on the hills, and made them richly wooded. 
 The climate was so good and healthy, that.the Romans greatly preferred the 
 military stations in Samaria to those of Judea. Yet the landscape is tame 
 and monotonous compared to that of Galilee. Its flat valleys, and straight 
 lines of hills, all rounded atop, and nearly of a height, contrast unfavour- 
 aldy with the bold scenery of the Galitean highlands— the home of Jesus. 
 
 Having reached the top of the steep hill up which the path stretches, 
 the large and fertile plain of Mukhna, running north and south, lay be- 
 neath Mounts Ebal and Gerizim, the giants of the mountains of Ephraim, 
 which rose midway on its western side, while lovr chains of gently sloping
 
 FROM JERUSALEM TO SAMARIA. 331 
 
 hills enclosed it, as a whole. The path descends towards the hills which 
 skirt the ■western side of the plain, and runs along their base, rising and 
 falling in long undulations. Picturesque clumps of trees still dot the hill- 
 eides, and bare, precipitous faces of rock rise above the green fields and 
 olive-yards, which more or less cover the slopes, mingling, at last, with 
 trees above. Half-way up tlie plain, a small valley opens to the west, 
 between Ebal and Gerizim, which rise, steep and precipitous on the side 
 next the plain, to the height, respectively, of 1,250 and 1,100 feet, both, as 
 seen from below, equally sterile. The path enters the valley by a gentle 
 ascent, and a brook of fresh, clear water, which turns a mill on its way, 
 flows out with a pleasant miirmur, into the plain. On the left, Gerizim 
 towers in rugged and bold masses ; on the right, Ebal, which, though 
 steep, is terraced to a considerable height, with gardens fenced by the fig 
 cactus ; other terraces, planted with corn, extending, in some parts, even 
 to the summit. 
 
 The town of Nablus — the ancient Shechem — is about a mile and a half 
 from the mouth of this side valley, in which it stands. Luxuriant gardens^ 
 richly watered, girdle it round outside its old and dilapidated walls, whose 
 gates, hanging off their hinges, are an emblem of all things else, at this 
 day, in Palestine. The valley, at the town, is so narrow, that a strong 
 man might almost shoot an arrow from the one hill to the other. The 
 houses of Xablus are stone — a number of them of several stories — with 
 small windows and balconies, and low doors, over which texts of the Koran 
 are often painted, as a sign that the householder has made the pilgrimage 
 to Mecca. It is a very small place, stretching fi-om east to west ; with 
 narrow covered streets, running north and south from the two principal 
 ones. Their sides are raised, so as to leave a filthy, sunken path in the 
 middle, for cattle ; but, as a set-off to this, many copious fountains and 
 clear rivulets, flow through those on the west of the town. 
 
 To this ancient city, then in its glory, and very different from its pre- 
 sent condition — along this path — Jesus was coming, no doubt agreeably 
 impressed by the beauties of a spot unequalled in Palestine for its land- 
 scape. Clumps of lofty walnut-trees, thick groves of almond, pomegranate, 
 olive, pear, and plum-trees, adorned the outskirts, and ran towards the 
 opening of the valley. The weather was bright and Avarm, and the 
 brightness would fill the many-coloured woods and verdure, with the 
 melodious songs of birds. The clear, sweet notes of our own blackbird; 
 the loud thrill of the lark, high overhead, and the chirping of finches, in 
 each copse, rose then, as now. The brooks of clear mountain water then, 
 as to-day, played, and splashed, and murmured past. Thousands of 
 flowers enamelled the grass on the slopes, for the "blessings of Joseph" 
 reached their highest in the valley of Shechem. "The land of Syria," 
 said Mahomet, " is beloved by Allah beyond all lands, and the part of 
 Syria which He loveth most is the district of Jerusalem, and the place 
 which He loveth most in the district of Jerusalem is the Mountain of 
 Kabliis." The contrast with nature was only an anticipation of the 
 brighter spiritual prospect. But before Jesus came to the town, He 
 halted for a time to rest.
 
 332 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Close under the eastern foot of Grerizim, at the opening of the side valley 
 from the wide plain, on a slight knoll, a mile and a half from the town, 
 surrounded now, by stones and broken pillars, is Jacob's well. The ruins 
 are those of an old church, Avhich stood over the well as early as the fifth 
 century, but has long ago perished in the storms of past ages. Over the 
 well, a few years since, were still to be seen the remains of an alcove, such 
 as is built beside most Eastern wells, to give a seat and shelter to the 
 tired wayfarer. There is no question that the name of the ancient patri- 
 arch is rightly given. Thirty or forty springs are found in the neighbour- 
 hood, but they were, doubtless, already, in Jacob's day, private property, 
 so that he had no alternative but to sink a well for himself. Nor was it 
 a slight undertaking, for it is dug through the alluvial soil, to an unknown 
 depth, and lined throughout with strong rough masonry. It is still about 
 seventy-five feet deep, but so recently as 1838 it was thirty feet deeper, 
 each year helping to fill it up, from the practice of all who visit it, both 
 natives and travellers, of throwing in stones, to hear their rebound. This 
 custom, which may be recent, adding to the accumulations of nearly four 
 thousand years, has filled it up perhaps one-half. The shaft is seven and 
 a half feet in diameter, and the whole work must have been the labour 
 of years. It is exactly on the watershed of the district, but as it depends 
 on rainwater only, it is, now, often dry, though, perhaps, when of a greater 
 depth, always more or less full. Lieut. Anderson descended it in 1866, 
 and found it quite dry, but an unbroken pitcher at the bottom showed 
 that there was water in it at some seasons. Latterly, it has been buried 
 under a great heap of stones, hiding its mouth, which Lieut. Anderson 
 found in a sunken chamber, twenty feet deep, the opening being just large 
 enough to admit a man's body. 
 
 Tired with His long mountain walk, and by the heat of noon — for it was 
 midday, and noon in Palestine, even in December, is often warm — Jesus 
 was glad to turn aside, and rest by Jacob's well. It was, moreover, the 
 hour for refreshment, and He resolved to stay in the grateful shade of the 
 trees and the alcove, while His disciples went up to the little valley to the 
 town to buy food. The funds supplied by friends, who delighted to 
 minister to Him, provided the ready means. 
 
 As He thus rested, a Samaritan woman, from Sychar, which may have 
 been the same place as "Shechem, or, perhaps, was the village near the 
 well, now known as Askar, approached, with a water jar on her head, as is 
 the custom, and a long cord in her hand, with which to let the jar down 
 the Avoll. Few sought the place at that hour, for evening was the common 
 time for drawing water, and thus Jesus and she were alone. To ask a 
 draught of water is a request no one in the East thinks of refusing, for 
 the hot climate makes all feel its value. Hence, under ordinary circum- 
 stances, it might have been expected, on Jesus craving this favour, that 
 it would be granted as a matter of course. His dress, or dialect, however, 
 had shown the woman that He was a Jew, and the relations between Jews 
 and Samaritans made His seeking even such a trifling courtesy from her 
 seem strange, for the two nations were mortal enemies. After the depor- 
 tation of the Ten Tribes to Assyria, Samaria had been repeopled by
 
 FROM JERUSALEM TO S.IMARIA. 333 
 
 heathen colonists from various pi'ovinces of the Assyrian empire, by 
 fugitives from the antliorities of Judea, and by stragglers of one or other 
 of the Ten Tribes, who found their way home again. The first heathen 
 settlers, terrified at the increase of wild animals, especially lions, and 
 attributing it to their not knowing the proper worship of the God of the 
 country, sent for one of the exiled priests, and, under his instructions, 
 added the worship of Jehovah to that of their idols — aii incident in their 
 history, from which later Jewish hatred and derision taunted them as 
 " proselytes of the lions," as it branded them, from their Assyrian origin, 
 with the name of Cuthites. Ultimately, however, they became more 
 rigidly attacked to the Law of Moses than even the Jews themselves. 
 Anxious to be recognised as Israelites, they set their hearts on joining the 
 Two Tribes, on their return from captivity, but the stern puritanism of 
 Ezra and Xehemiali admitted no alliance between the pure blood of Jeru- 
 salem and the tainted race of the north. Resentment at this affront was 
 natural, and excited resentment in return, till, in Christ's day, centuries 
 of strife and mutual injury, intensified by theological hatred on both sides, 
 had made them imjDlacable enemies. The Samaritans had built a temple 
 on Mount Gerizim, to rival that of Jerusalem, but it had been destroyed 
 by John Hyrcanus, who had also levelled Samaria to the ground. They 
 claimed for their mountain a greater holiness than that of Moriah ; accused 
 the Jews of adding to the word of God, by receiving the Avritings of the 
 prophets, and prided themselves on owning only the Pentateuch as 
 inspired ; favoured Herod because the Jews hated him, and were loyal to 
 him and the equally hated Eoman ; had kindled false lights on the hills, 
 to vitiate the Jewish reckoning by the new moons, and thus throw their 
 feasts into confusion, and, in the early youth of Jesus, had even defiled 
 the very Temple itself, by strewing human bones in it, at the Passover. 
 
 ISTor had hatred slumbered on the side of the Jews. They knew the 
 Samaritans only as Cuthites, or heathen from Gutli. " The race that I 
 hate is no race," says the son of Sirach. It was held that a people who 
 once had worshipped five gods could have no part in Jehovah. The claim 
 of the Samaritans, that Moses had buried the Tabernacle and its vessels 
 on the top of Gerizim, was laughed to scorn. It was said that they had 
 dedicated their temple, under Antiochus Epiphanes, to the Greek Jupiter. 
 Their keeping the commands of Moses even more strictly than the Jews, 
 that it might seem they were really of Israel, was not denied ; but their 
 heathenism, it was said, had been joroved by the discovery of a brazen 
 dove, which they worshipjoed, on the top of Gerizim. It would have been 
 enough that they boasted of Herod as their good king, who had married a 
 daughter of their people ; that he had been free to follow, in their country, 
 his Eoman tastes, so hated in Judea ; that they had remained quiet, after 
 his death, when Judea and Galilee were in uiiroar, and that, for their 
 peacefiilness, a fourth of their taxes had been remitted and added to the 
 burdens of Judea. Their friendliness to the Romans was an additional pro- 
 vocation. While the Jews were kept cpiet only by the sternest severity, 
 and strove to the utmost against the introduction of anything foreign, the 
 Samaritans rejoiced in the new importance which their loyalty to the
 
 334 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 empire had given them. Shechcm flourislied; cloiic by, in Ca3saroa, the 
 procurator held his court ; a division of cavahy, in barracks at Sebaste — 
 the old Samaria— had been raised in the territory. Tlie Eoman strangers 
 were more than welcome to while away the summer in their umbragcouai 
 valleys. 
 
 The illimitable hatred rising from so many sources, found vent in tho 
 tradition that a special curse had been uttered against the Samaritans, by 
 Ezra, Zerubbabel, and Joshua. It was said that these great ones assemljlcd 
 the whole congregation of Israel in the Temple, and that three hundred 
 priests, with three hundred trumpets, and three hundred books of the 
 Law, and three hundred scholars of the Law, had been employed to repeat, 
 amidst the most solemn ceremonial, all the curses of the Law against 
 the Samaritans. They had been subjected to every form of excommunica- 
 tion ; by the incommunicable name of Jehovah ; by the Tables of tlie Law 
 and by the heavenly and earthly synagogues. The very name became a 
 reproach. "We know that Thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil," said 
 the Jews, to Jesus, in Jerusalem. " There may be friendliness between 
 Samaria and Jerusalem," said a young Habbi, summing up the points in 
 dispute between his nation and the Samaritans, " when the Cuthites have 
 no more to do with Mount Gerizim ; when they praise Israel, and believe 
 in the resurrection of the dead — but not till then." No Israelite could 
 lawfully eat even a mouthful of food that had been touched by a Samaritan, 
 for " to do so was as if he ate the flesh of swine." No Samaritan was 
 allowed to become a proselyte, nor could he have any part in the resuiTCC- 
 tion of the dead. A Jew might be friendly with a heathen, bvit never with 
 a Samaritan, and all bargains made with one were invalid. The testimony 
 of a Samaritan could not be taken in a Jewish court, and to receive one 
 into one's house would bring down the curse of God. It had even becomo 
 a subject of warm controversy how far a Jew might use food or fruit grown 
 on Samaritan soil. What grows on trees or in fields was reckoned clean 
 but it was doubtful respecting flour or wine. A Samaritan egg, as the 
 hen laid it, could not be unclean, but what of a boiled egg ? Yet interest 
 and convenience strove, by suljtle casuistry, to invent excuses for what 
 intercourse was unavoidable. The country of the Cuthites was clean, so 
 that a Jew might, without scruple, gather and eat its produce. The 
 waters of Samaria were clean, so that a Jew might drink them or wash in 
 them. Their dwellings were clean, so that he might enter them, and eat 
 or lodge in them. Their roads were clean, so that the dust of them did not 
 defile a Jew's feet. The Eabbis even went so far in their contradictory 
 utterances, as to say that the victuals of the Cuthites were allowed, if none 
 of their wine or vinegar were mixed with them, and even their unleavened 
 bread was to be reckoned fit for use at the Passover. Opinions thus 
 wavered, but, as a rule, harsher feeling prevailed. 
 
 Jesus was infinitely above such unworthy strifes and prejudices, and 
 His disciples had caught something of His calm elevation, for they had 
 already set off to the city for food, when He spoke to the woman. She 
 coiild only, in her wonder, ask, in reply, "How is it that Thou, being a Jew, 
 askest drink of me, who am a Samaritan woman ? " Her frankness and
 
 FEOM JERUSALEM TO SAMARIA. 335 
 
 kindly bearing had its reward. With His wondrous skill in using even 
 the smallest and commonest trifles to lead to the highest and worthiest 
 truths, He lifts her thoughts to matters infinitely above the mere wants 
 of the body. By an easy transition, He tells her of living water, the gift 
 of God, which He has to give — so precious, that, if she knew what it was, 
 and who He was who spoke with her, she, in her turn, would ask Him to 
 allow her to drink. He meant, of course, the Divine grace and truth 
 given by Him to those who sought it, the true living water, ever 
 fresh in its quickening power and efficacy to satisfy the thirst of the soul. 
 Such a metaphor was exactly fitted to arrest her attention, but, like 
 Nicodemus, she rises no higher than the literal sense. "You cannot 
 mean the Avater in the well here," says she : " You cannot give me that, 
 for you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Whence, then, 
 can you get this living water of which you speak.? Are you greater than 
 our father Jacob, who gave us the well ? It was good enough for him and 
 his to drink from, and you speak as if you had other and better ! " Sam- 
 aritan tradition had traced the well to the gift of Jacob, though it is not 
 mentioned in Genesis ; and Jacob— to a Samaritan, as to a Jew — was 
 almost more than a man. Her curiosity was now fairly roused, and her 
 willingness to hear was evident. " This water is, no doubt, good," replied 
 Jesus, " but any one who drinks it will thirst again ; whereas he who drinks 
 the water that I give will never thirst, but will find it like a well of water 
 in his soul, springing up into everlasting life." More and more interested, 
 the woman ci'aves some of this miracnloias water, that she may not thirst, 
 nor need to come all the way thither to draw. She still thinks only of 
 common water. 
 
 But now followed a question which, while apparently of no moment, 
 showed her that she was before One who knew the secrets of her life, and, 
 while it woke a sense of guilt, opened the way for penitence. " Go, call 
 thy husband." She answered that she had none. " You are right," replied 
 Jesus, " for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is nob 
 your husband." The five had either divorced her for immorality, or were 
 dead : to the sixth she was not married. 
 
 The light, half -bold mood of the woman was now entirely past. " My 
 lord," said she, " I perceive that Thou art a prophet," and, doubtless, with 
 the conviction, there flashed through her breast the kindred thought, that 
 the Jewish religion, which He seemed to represent, must be the true one. 
 Then, perhaps half wishing to turn the conversation — with a glance at the 
 holy hill, towering eight hundred feet above them — she added, " Our 
 fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the 
 place where men ought to worship." 
 
 To the Samaritans, Gerizim was the most holy spot on earth. It was 
 Ihcir sacred mountain, and had been, as they believed, the seat of Paradise, 
 while all the streams that water the earth were supposed to flow from it. 
 Adam had been formed of its dust, and had lived on it. The few 
 Samaritans still surviving, show, even at this day, the spot on which 
 he built his first altar, and that on which, afterwards, the altar of 
 Seth, also, was raised. They fancied that Gerizim was Ararat, fifteen
 
 336 THE LIFE OF CHFaST. 
 
 cubits liiglior than tlie next highest and next holiest mountain on earth- 
 Mount Ebal, and that it was the one pure and hallowed spot in the world, 
 which, having risen above the waters of the flood, no corpse had defiled. 
 Every Samaritan child of the neighbourhood could point out the places on 
 it where Noah came out from the ark, and where he raised his altar, and 
 show its seven steps, on each of which JSToah offered a sacrifice. The altar 
 on which Abraham bound Isaac, and the spot where the ram was 
 caught in tlie thicket, were amongst its wonders. In the centre of the 
 summit was the broad stone on which Jacob rested his head wlien he 
 saw the mystic ladder, and, near it, the spot where Joshua built the first 
 altar in the land, after its conquest, and the twelve stones he set up, on 
 the under side of which, they believed, the Law of Moses had been writ- 
 ten. On this holy ground their Temple had stood for two hundred years, 
 till destroyed by the Jews a hundred and twenty-nine j'cars before Christ. 
 Towards Gerizim every Samaritan turned his face when he prayed, and 
 it was believed the Messiah would first appear on its top, to bring from 
 their hiding-solace in it the sacred vessels of the Tabernacle of Moses. 
 It was unsjjeakably dear to the nation, as the one spot on earth wliere 
 man was nearest his Maker. The simple Samaritan woman with whom 
 Jesus talked, had been trained up in the vmdoubting belief of all these 
 legends, and her respectful mention of Jerusalem, a jDlace sacred in the 
 eyes of the Jew, showed a spirit ready to be taught. 
 
 She was only a humble woman, and withal, of poor antecedents, but it 
 was the characteristic of Jesus to recognise the better self, even in the 
 outcast and lost. The hope and joy of the triumphant future of His king- 
 dom rose in His soul as He discoursed with her. No narrow intolerance 
 had place in His breast ; no haughty Jewish nationality prejudiced Him 
 against man as man. Away from the close stifling bigotry and fierce self- 
 righteousness of Judea, He breathed more freely. To the Samaritans He 
 always seems to have felt kindly ; for in His immortal parable, it was a 
 Samaritan whom He chose to illustrate the law of neighbourly love ; it 
 was a Samaritan who, alone, of the ten lepers He healed, returned to give 
 glory to God; and, now, it was a Samaritan woman who, lay opening her 
 heart to His words, first cheered His spirit, after the cold unbelief of 
 Judea. The influences of the spot, moreover, had, doubtless, their effect 
 on one so much in communion with nature. The towering hills on each 
 side— steep— well-nigh precipitous, and, as seen from the well where He 
 sat, naked and sterile; the undulating valley between them, with its 
 babbling brook; the busy and prosperous Shechem, embowered in gardens 
 and orchards ; the great plain at hand, ten miles in length and half as 
 broad, v.'ith its cornfields, vineyards, and olive groves, spread far and 
 near; the framework of hills enclosing it round; the whole flooded by 
 the bright Eastern noon, must have touched His delicate sensibility, as 
 they could not have affected duller natures. The very associations of the 
 scene must have breathed a sacred inspiration; for here Jacob had wan- 
 dered ; he had paid a hundred pieces of money for the very ground on 
 which this well had been dug; and here, Joseph, his famous son, lay 
 buried, within the bounds of his father's purchase. Here Joshua had
 
 FEOM JEEUSALEM TO SAMARIA. 337 
 
 gathered the ti-ibes to hear the Law from the rounded hill-tops above, and 
 Gideon, and a long roll of judges and kings, liad made it the centre oi 
 their rule. The j^lain before Him had been the gathering place of the 
 hosts of Israel, and now He, the greater Joshua, a mightier judge than 
 Gideon, and the true "Prince of God," was about to summon the peace- 
 ful soldiers of the spiritual Israel to a loftier struggle than ever ea.rth had 
 seen— for Trutli and God. A Divine enthusiasm filled His soul, and the 
 vision of the sacred future He came to inaugm'ate for man rose within 
 Him, when the local, national, and transitory in religion should have 
 passed away before the universal, spiritual, and eternal. " Believe me," 
 said He, " an hour comes, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor in 
 Jerusalem, worship the Father. Ye worship God without knowing Him — 
 ignorantly. Your Temple, when it stood, was without a name ; still worse, 
 your forefathers, after a time, dedicated it to idols. You have rejected 
 the prophets and all the Scriptures after Moses, and, thus, are not in 
 living connection with the earlier history of the kingdom of God; have no 
 intelligent knowledge of the advancing steps by which God has revealed 
 Himself, but rest on dark traditions and fancies, natural in a people whose 
 religion began with the worship of strange gods along with Jehovah. 
 We, Jews, worship that which our having received the Scriptures, has 
 taught us to know. The Messiah and His salvation must come from 
 among the Jews. They have cherished the firm, pure, and living hope of 
 Him, revealed more and more fully in the prophets, and their Temple, 
 which has always been sacred to Jehovah alone, has kept this hope ever 
 before them. But, though the Jews be right, as against the Samaritans, 
 in so far as relates to the past, both are on equal footing as to the far 
 more glorious future. An hour comes, and now is, when the true wor- 
 shippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeketh 
 such as worship Him thus. God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him 
 must worship in spirit and truth." 
 
 Words like these marked an epoch in the spiritual history of the world ; 
 a revolution in all previous ideas of the relation of man to his Maker. 
 They are the proclamation of the essential equality of man before God, 
 and show the loftiest superiority to innate human prejudice or narrowness. 
 Christ speaks, not as a Je-w, but as the Son of Man ; the representative of 
 the whole race. The bitter controversy between race and race is only 
 touched, in passing, with a Divine mildness. Eising high, not merely 
 above his own age, but even above the prejudices of all ages since. He 
 gives mankind their cliarter of spiritual liberty for evermore. Jeru- 
 salem and Gerizim are only local and subordinate considerations. The 
 worth of man's homage to God does not de^jend on the place where it is 
 paid. The true worship has its temple in the inmost soul ; in the sjiirit 
 and heart. It is the life of the soul ; it is communion with God ; the 
 reverent espousal of our nature to truth. It is spiritual and moral, not 
 outward and ritual ; springing from the great truth, rightly apprehended, 
 which Jesus had first uttered, that God is a Spirit. The revelation of this, 
 in the wide application now given it, was the foundation of the New 
 Religion of all Humanity. The isolation and exclusiveness of foi*mer 
 
 z
 
 338 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 creeds were swept away by it for ever. Eeligion was henceforth no tribal 
 privilege jealously kept within the narrow bounds of mere nationality. 
 The universal presence of a spiritual God made the whole world alike His 
 slAriue. The veil of the Temple was first rent at Jacob's Yfell, and He 
 Who, till then, had, as men thought, dwelt only in the narrow limits of 
 tlie chamber it shrouded, went forth thence, from that hour, to consecrate 
 all the earth as one great Holy of Holies. Samaritans, Heathen, Jews, 
 were, henceforth, proclaimed children of a common heavenly Father, and 
 Jesus, when He claimed, the nest moment, to be the Messiah, announced 
 Himself as the Saviouu of the Would. 
 
 Perplexed to understand words so lofty, the simple-minded woman was 
 fain to put off any attempt to solve them, till He came, for whom, in com- 
 mon with the Jews, she waited. She felt hardly convinced, and wished 
 to leave the question about Gerizim and Jerusalem till the Great Prophet 
 appeared. '■ I know that Messiah comes, who is called Christ ; when He 
 shall come, He will tell us all things." Even the Samaritans had their 
 hopes of a great Deliverer, expecting Hina to restore the kingdom of 
 Israel, and renew the worship at Mount Gerizim, but they thought of him 
 only as acting by human agencies for inferior ends. 
 
 Jesus was far from recognising her as right in all she meant by such an 
 answer, but she had displayed a modest and docile spirit, such as He 
 always loved. She had acknowledged Him as a prophet, had listened 
 eagerly to His words, and shown how she hoped that the Messiah, when 
 He came, would set the long controversy to rest. Her honest wish to 
 know the truth; her interest in the standing of her people to God and the 
 Law, and her anxious yearning for the coming of the Messiah, revealed a 
 frame of mind fitted to receive further light. " You need not wait," said 
 He, "I that speak unto thee am He." "The first great revelation of the 
 Saviour was to humble shepherds. The first direct disclosure of Himself 
 as the Messiah was to an humble Samaritan woman ! " 
 
 Meanwhile, the disciples had returned from the city, and wondered to 
 find him talking with a woman. The relations of the sexes, even in com- 
 mon life, wore very narrow and suspicious among the Jews. That a 
 woman should allow herself to be seen unveiled was held immodest, and 
 she was reckoned almost unchaste if heard singing a song even in private. 
 In Judea a biidegroom might be alone with his bride, for the first time, 
 an hour befoi'e marriage, 1:)ut in Galilee even this Avas thought unbecom- 
 ing. Trades which brought the tw^o sexes in any measure into contact 
 were regarded with suspicion, and no unmarried person of either sex 
 could be a teacher, lest the 2iarents of the children might visit the school. 
 In Rabbis especially, even to speak with a Avoman in public Avas held in- 
 decorous in the highest degree. " No one " (that is, no Eabbi), says the 
 Talmud, " is to speak with a woman, even if she be his wife, in the public 
 street." It was forbidden to greet a Avoman, or take any notice of her. 
 " Six things," Ave are told, " are to be shunned by a Ptabbi. He must not 
 be seen in the street, dripping with oil, Avhicli woukl imply vanity : he 
 must not go out at night alone : he is not to wear patched shoes (Avhich in 
 certain cases Avovdd be carrying a burden, when it was unlawful to do so) :
 
 FEOM JERUSALEM TO SAMAEIA. 339 
 
 lie must not speak witli a -noinaii in a public place : he must stuu all 
 intercourse -with common people (for, not knowing the Law, they might be 
 'unclean') : he must not take long steps (for that would show that he 
 Avas not sunk in the study of the Law) : and he must not walk erect (for 
 that would betray pride)." Though higher in position and respect among 
 the Jews tlian in other Eastern nations, woman, at the time of Christ, was 
 treated as wholly inferior to man. " Let the words of the Law be burned," 
 says Eabbi Eleazer, "rather than committed to women." "He who in- 
 structs his daughter in the Law," says the Talmud, "instructs her in 
 folly." But He who came to raise mankind to spiritual freedom and 
 moral purity, included woman, as well as man, in His grand philanthropy, 
 and treated with silent contemiot the prudery by -which it was sought to 
 humble the one sex and exalt the other. He was a teacher not for an age, 
 but for all time, and woman owes her elevation to social equality with 
 man to the lofty respect shown her by Jesus of Nazareth. To have the 
 courage of one's opinions is rare, and it is rarer still to retain, with it, a 
 modest humility and simple worship of truth. With most of us, it is 
 rather supercilious contempt of inferior judgments than lowly homage to 
 conviction. Li Jesus alone is it found as an instinctive and never-failing 
 characteristic, with no blemish or qualification of attendant weakness. 
 He acts, at all times, as before God alone, and as if unconscious of 
 the presence or opinions of man, 
 
 Strange as the incident must have seemed to the disciples, the awe and 
 reverence which Jesus had already excited in their minds checked any 
 expression of surprise. Meanw^hile the woman, leaving her pitcher, 
 hurried off to the city, to make known the presence of the wonderful 
 stranger, and urge as many as she could, to go to Him, and see if He were 
 not the expected Messiah. In her absence, the disciples once and again 
 invited Jesus to take some refreshment. But His soul was too full of 
 other thoughts, which drove away all sense of hunger. " I have meat to 
 eat," said He, " that ye know not of," — words, which to their dull material 
 range of mind, seemed only to refer to food brought in their absence. 
 " My meat," said He, seeing their misconception, "is to do the will of 
 Him that sent Me, and to finish His work." Then, lifting His eyes, and 
 lookhig up the stretching valley, or round the wide sweep of the plain, in 
 both of which, doubtless, the busy peasants were scattering the seed for 
 the harvest, then four months distant. He caught sight of a miiltitude 
 coming, under the guidance of the woman, to hear His words. Fired at 
 the sight. He went on, — "You say, 'After four months will come the 
 harvest.' But I say, look yonder at the thi-ong approaching us. The]} 
 are the noblest harvest, and their coming shows that you have not to wait 
 to reap it, as they have to reap the seed now sowing ; for their souls, like 
 autumn fields, are already white for the sickle. And how rich the reward 
 for you. My disciples, wdio will be the reapers ! You will gather fruit, not 
 like the harvest of earth, but fruit unto life eteimal. You and I, the 
 Sower and the reapei's, may well rejoice together in the parts assigned us 
 by God. Thiidc of the final harvest-home, when Heaven, the great garner, 
 shall have the last sheaf carried thither ! The sower and the reaper are
 
 340 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 indeed distinct, as the proverb has it, speaking of common life. I have 
 prepared and sown the field ; you shall, hereafter, do the labour that is 
 needed as it grows, and reap the sheaves as they ripen. Your work will 
 be real of its kind, but to break up the soil, and cast in the seed, is harder 
 than to watch the rising green. I send you to enter on the fruit of My 
 toil." 
 
 Judea had yielded no harvest, but the despised people of Shechem were 
 better spiritual soil. There was no idle thronging around, as in Judea, in 
 hopes of seeing miracles : none were asked, and none were wrought. The 
 simpler and healthier natures with which Ho here came in contact, were 
 satisfied, in many cases, by the words of the woman alone. Gathering to 
 hear, His words deepened the convictions of those impressed already, and 
 roused the hearts of others. At their request, two days were spent in 
 teaching. To have stayed longer might, perhaps, have compromised the 
 future, by raising Jewish prejudice. Meanwhile, the work, thus aus- 
 piciously begun, could not fail to spread. " We believe," said the new 
 converts, after the two days' intercourse with Jesus, " not because of the 
 woman's sajdng, for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is, 
 indeed, the Saviour of the world." Jews might have acknowledged Him 
 as the Messiah, but only Samaritans, with their far more generous con- 
 ceptions of the Messianic Kingdom, could have thought of Him as the 
 Saviour of mankind. 
 
 Thus, naturally, from the most indifferent trifle of daily life, had come 
 the disclosure of the highest truths, as a legacy to all ages. The well of 
 Jacob had become the seat of the Great Teacher, before whoso words, then 
 sjooken to a humble woman of Samaria, the most embittered enmities of 
 nations and religions will, one day, pass away. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII. 
 
 OPENING OF THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 
 
 A NATURE like that of Jesus, as sensitive as strong, must have felt 
 -^-^ the pleasure which only first successes can give, at His hearty 
 recei)tion by the Samaritans. Rejected in Judea, He had found willing 
 hearers in the despised people of Shechem. A nucleus of His kingdom 
 had been formed, and it must, by its nature, spread from heart to heart. 
 Intensely human in His sensibility, He now enjoyed the happiness He had 
 called forth in others, as, before, He had been depressed by its g,bsence. 
 He neither expected nor desired noisy popularity, for He knew that His 
 Kingdom could grow only by the secret conviction of soul after soul. 
 
 Yet, in one sense, it was abeady complete in every new disciple, for each 
 heart that received Him was a spot in which it was fully set up — its laws 
 accepted, and the will and affections entirely His. To every new adherent 
 He was more than king, for He reigned over their whole nature, with a 
 majesty such as no other king could command. The highest bliss of each 
 was to have no thought or wish apart from His, for in the measure of like-
 
 OPENING OF THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 341 
 
 ncss to Him, lay their sinritual purity, peace, and juy. They felt that to 
 become His disciples, was to anticipate the brightest hopes of the eternal 
 world, for it was to have their bosoms filled with the light and love of God. 
 Earth never saw such a king, or such a kingdom. 
 
 But He could not stay in Samaria. His work lay in Israel. Its people 
 had been prepared for it by the training of two thousand years, by cher- 
 ished hopes, and by the possession of the oracles of God ; the one grand 
 treasure of eterjial truth in the hands of man. They, alone, of all man- 
 kind realized the idea of a true kingdom of God ; thcj-, alone, were aglow 
 for its advent. Misconceptions removed, they were fitted above all other 
 races, to be theajjostles of the new religion, which, in reality, was only the 
 completing and perfecting of the old. 
 
 After a stay of two days, therefore, at Shechem, or near it, Jesus went 
 on northwards, towards Galilee. The road passes through Shechem, to 
 Samaria, which lies on its hill, at three hours' distance, on the north-west. 
 It was then in its glory, as Herod had left it ; no longer the old Samaria, 
 but the splendid Sebaste, named thus in compliment to Augustus. Its 
 grand public buildings, its magnificent temple, dedicated, in blasphemous 
 flattery, to Augustus, its colonnades, triumphal arches, baths, and theatres, 
 and its famous wall, twenty stadia in circuit, with elaborate gates enclos- 
 ing the whole — were before Him as He passed on. At Engannim, " the 
 Fountain of Gardens," on the southern slope of the great plain of Esdraelon, 
 He crossed the Samaritan border, and was once more in Galilee. 
 
 Avoiding ISTazareth, with a wise instinct that a ^jrophet had no honour 
 in His own country, He continued His journey to Cana, across the green 
 pastures and corn-fields of the plain of Battauf. He had, indeed, felt, 
 before leaving Samaria, that a district where He had been familiarly 
 known in His earlier life would be less disposed to receive Him than 
 others in which He was a stranger, but this could only apply to the imme- 
 diate bounds of Nazareth or Capernaum. On the other hand, the news 
 of His popularity in Judca, and of His miracles and discourses in Jeru- 
 salem, had been carried back to Galilee, by pilgrims who had returned 
 from the feast, and had, doubtless, secured Him a much better reception 
 in the province at large than, as Himself a Galila3an, He would otherwise 
 have found. But even had He felt that He would bo rejected in Galilee 
 as He had been in Judea, His homage to duty, and grand self-sacrifice to 
 its demands, would have so much the more impelled Him to carry His 
 great message thither. Personal feelings had no place in His soul. It 
 would have been only one nrore, added to His life-long conflicts with 
 human perversity and evil, to brave foreboded indifference and neglect, 
 and offer even to those who slighted Him the proofs of His Divine dignity 
 and worth. The prophet had foretold that the Great Light of the Kingdom 
 of God would shine in Galilee of the Gentiles, and amidst whatever 
 humiliation and pain of heart in anticipated rejection. He, its King, would 
 have gone thither to proclaim it, and honour the Divine prediction. 
 
 The first return of Jesus to Galilee, from the Jordan, had been marked 
 by the miracle at the wedding feast of Cana, as if to rouse the general 
 mind, and now, His second return was proclaimed in the same way. He,
 
 342 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 perhaps, had gone to live for a time with the friends for whom He had 
 turned the water into wine, or, it may be, 'He was a guest of Nathanael, 
 as, in Capernaum, of Peter. His reception, as He passed on His way to 
 Cana, had been cheering in the extreme, for the reports from the south 
 had raised Him to an undefined greatness in tiie popular eyes. They had 
 learned to be proud of Him as their countryman, when they found Him so 
 famous elsewhere. That croAvds had followed Him in Judea, secured Him 
 favour, so far, among the multitude in the north. His return had risen 
 to the dignity of a public event, and passed from lip to lip through the 
 Avhole district. 
 
 It had thus speedily become known in Capernaum that He was once 
 more in Cana, after His nine or ten months' absence from Galilee. His 
 miraculous power over sickness and physical evil, as shovrn in Jerusalem, 
 had become a subject of universal report, finding its way even into the 
 gilded seclusion of mansions and palaces. Among others, a high officer 
 of the court of Herod Antipas, whose mansion was in Capernaum, had 
 heard of the wonderful Teacher. We know how the miracles of Christ 
 reached the ears of Antipas himself; that Menahem, his foster-brother, 
 actually became an humble follower of Jesus, and that Joanna, the wIlo 
 of Chuza, the house steward or manager of the private affairs of Antipas, 
 was one of many devoted female disciples and friends, of the richer classes 
 — and can, thus, easily fancy how such a dignified official had learned 
 I'especting the new wonder-working Eabbi, The close heat of the borders 
 of the Lake of Galilee, vvdth their fr-inge of reeds and marsh, though then 
 tempered by the shade of countless orchards and wooded clumps, now 
 wholly wanting, has in all ages induced a prevalence of fever, at certain 
 seasons, and the malady had now seized his only son, avIio was still a child. 
 He had been led to look on Jesus as a wonderful Healer, by the cures 
 reported to have been wrought by Him, but he had not, apparently, 
 thought of Him as more. Hearing of His arrival at Cana, the hope that 
 He might save his son instantly deterixiined him to go thither and ask 
 His aid. The child, he said., was at the point of death, would Jesus come 
 down and heal him ? 
 
 There was something in the poor man's bearing, however, that showed 
 the superficial conception he had formed of Christ's character and work. 
 Miracles, with Jesus, were only means to a higher end, credentials to en- 
 force the reception of spiritual truth. That truth was its own witness, and 
 had sufficed to win a ready homage from the despised people of Sychar. 
 To be the Healer of souls, not of the body, was His great mission, but the 
 nobleman had, as yet, no idea of Him except as a Hakim or Eophai, who 
 had joroved His power to overcome disease. He had been led to Him not 
 by the report and acceptance of the great truths He taught : only the 
 rumour of His miracles had created interest enough to pass through the 
 land. That he was utterly unconscious of the spiritual death from which 
 he himself needed to be rescued, touched the sympathy of Christ. " How 
 is it," asked He, in effect, " that you come to Me only for outward healing, 
 and believe on Me only as a worker of signs and wonders ? Have you no 
 sense of sin; no craving for sj)iritual healing; no iimer sympathy with
 
 OPENING OF THE MINISTEY IN GALILEE. 343 
 
 the teaching of My life and -words ? " Without moral preparation in hi,s 
 own mind, the healing of his son might confirm hclief in the power of the 
 Healer; but would bring no spiritual reception of the truth, to heal tlie 
 soul. Apparently repelling him for the moment, Jesus was, in fact, open- 
 ing his eyes to the far greater blessings he might freely obtain. "With 
 royal bounty He Avished to bestow the greater while He gave the less, for 
 it was His wont, after needed reproof, to give more than had been asked. 
 Meanwhile, the only thought of the parent's heart was his dying boy. 
 " Sir, come down ere my child die." Jesus knew that he would believe 
 if his son were healed, but wished to raise a higher moral frame, which 
 would do so from kindled sympathy with spiritual truth Avithout such an 
 outward ground. To believe His word, from its own internal evidence, 
 showed higher faith than that which only followed miracles. It revealed 
 a recognition of the truth from interest in it : a sensibility of soul to what 
 was pure and holy. But belief as the result of miracles was not discoun- 
 tenanced : it was only held inferior. 
 
 The nobleman had assumed that Jesus would go back with him to 
 Capernaum, and heal the child; but he was before One to whose power 
 distance offered no hindrance. With the eas}^ unaffected dignity of con- 
 scious superiority, he is told to "go his way ; his son lived:" words few 
 and simple, but enough to let him know that the Speaker had, on the 
 instant, healed the child. Nor could he doubt it. To have spoken with 
 Jesus assured him that he might believe His word. Forthwith he set out 
 on his return. 
 
 lb was about twenty miles from Cana to Capernaum, and the miracle 
 had been wrought an hour after noon. Resting by the way, at early 
 nightfall, as he well might on a road so insecure, ho started again next 
 morning, but erelong met some of his own slaves, sent to tell him the good 
 news that the boy was convalescent, and to prevent his bringing Jesus 
 any further. "Your son," said they, "is not dead, but is getting better. 
 The fever has left him." " When," asked the father, " did he begin to 
 amend P " " Yesterday, about one o'clock, the fever broke." It was the 
 very time when Jesus had told him that the boy would live. What could 
 ho do but accept Him as what he now know He claimed to be— the Messiah. 
 " Himself belicA-cd and his whole house." 
 
 How long Jesus remained in Cana is not known, but that Ho was for a 
 time unattended by the small band of disciples vi'ho had accomjianied Him 
 to the Passover, is certain. They had remained with Him, in Judca, and 
 had returned with Him, through Sychar, to Galilee, but, after so long an 
 absence from home, He had let them go back to tlie Lake of Galilee, to 
 their occupations, till He should once more call them finally to His service. 
 
 He had retired to the north, before the rising signs of opposition from 
 the Pharisees, who had at last found means to get John imprisoned, by 
 their intrigues with Antipas, and might, at any moment, have effected 
 His own arrest. An interval of some months now elapsed, perhaps in 
 stillness and privacy, the time not having yet come, for some reasons 
 unknown to us, for His final and jiermanent entrance on His public work. 
 His mother and the family had returned to Nazareth from their short
 
 o-i-i Tiiii JAW. OF rinasT. 
 
 gtt>y at Cft)H>vua\mi. ftiul. it is most pn^bivblo. theivfun\ that lie. oiioo moi-o, 
 Avitlulrow to the soolusiou of His etuly homo, mul li\ od tlunv foi- u tiino in 
 jvtiuMuoiit, Tho futo of tho l^aptist lutvv luvvo uuulo it neoossary to uvoid 
 for a time giving- m\y pivto-xt of politieal Hlarm to Herod by His at onoo 
 taking Jo)u»'s place. Thivt ono so Ycnoi^tod liad been thi^own into tho 
 dungvons of Maehaorus dou\>tUvss spit>ad to the farthest vjdleys. IVU^n 
 almost hoped thsit tho mighty preaeher woidd sofu-n tho heai t oven of 
 Antipas. and. in aiiy ease, could not cnnlit that a man so cowardly ami 
 politic Avonld dai"0 to take the life (U" the honoxntnl pi"0|)lxot. This and that 
 measure of the tyrant Avere attributed by the credulous mvdtitudoto John's 
 intluence. The Avhole country Nvas agitated, day after day, by r\inionrs 
 i"ospocting him. 
 
 Nor wcTO other subjects of popular excitement wanting. In the antuum 
 of that, or the year before, apparently at tho Feast of 'rabernacles, tlu>re 
 had been a tieive struggle between the lu>u\nn garrison at Jernsaleui and 
 the pilgrims fi-om Galilee, ever excitable and nn>dy to fight. In the heat 
 of tho contest the soldiers from Antouia had pressed into the very courts 
 of the 'I'emple, and had hewn down the l^aliUeans at the great altar, beside 
 their sacritices, mingling their blood with that of the slain beasts. Tho 
 sons of Judas the Galihvan, tho famous leader of the Zealots in their first 
 givat insurrection against Ivome, had. moreover. gTOAVu up to manhood in 
 the hills ne.ar Kazai-eth, and cherished in their own breasts, and kept alive 
 amojig the people, their father's tiewo scheme for the erection of the king- 
 dom of Gt)d by the sword ; a fatal inheritance, for which they were one 
 dav, like (Mirist. to be crucitied. The whole laiul heaved with religions 
 fanaticism like an ever-thrcatoning volcano. Above all the tunudt txf such 
 a state of things, however, the impi'isoned proi>het was the one thought of 
 the oonntiy. Laments over him, mingled, doubtless, with tierco mutter- 
 ing-s. filled every market-place and every home. Tt was a sign of tho 
 glowing religious sensibility of the times, and a svuumons to Jesus to take 
 up tho gi*eat ww'k thus interrupted. The tyi'aut in Perea had silenced the 
 voice that had proclaimed the eonxing of the kingilom of God, but ile, 
 whose herald John had been, was at hand to take it up agjviu, witli grander 
 emphasis, on a more comn\andiug theatre. Isaiah, the son of Amoz, had 
 once seen a vision cf Jehovah in tlx© Temple, and had recognised his 
 sunnnons as a prophet, when, amidst the chants of the Levites, ai\d the 
 clouds of incense, and the blasts of the sacred trumpets, the house was 
 filled with smoke, and the very earth seemed to tremble. The Spirit came 
 on Amos, tho shepherd, as he followed his flocks on the lonely pastures, 
 when he thought how the Syrians had threshed Gilead with in>n sledges, 
 and how Tyro had sold the sons of Israel to Edom as slaves; and. seeming 
 to hear Jehovah call to him from Zion, and thunder from Jerusalem, ho 
 forsook his hills, to be a shepherd to Israel. The loud miiversal lamenta- 
 tions over John were such a tiual Piviue call to Jesus. 
 
 Finally leaving His early honve, therefore. He bent His steps once more 
 towards Capernaum, which was, henceforth, to become '" His own city," 
 and the centre of His futuie work. The pi"ophet, ages befoi'O, had painted 
 the joyous times that should ctYace the memorv of the Assvrian invasion.
 
 OPENING OF THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. Si'j 
 
 and in the aj/pcarance of Chrijst in these regions, their full realization had 
 now come. The land of Zehulon, and the land of Naphtali ; the country 
 towards tlie Hea of Galilee; the districts beyond the Jordan; and Galilee 
 of the Geiitiles, in the far north, towards Tyre and Sidon— the people that 
 sat in darkness, — saw a great light, and to them that sat in the region and 
 shadow of death, a light sprang up. Galilee was to be pre-eminently the 
 scene of the ministry of Je:suH, and it is curious that even the llabbis, in 
 their earliest traditions, express the belief that it would be that of the 
 manifestation of the Messiah. To this day, Jews gather in Tiberias, one 
 of their four holy cities, from all parts of the earth, to wait for the coming 
 of the Messiah, or, at least, to be buried there, in expectation of His 
 advent. 
 
 It would seem as if Jesus Ixad, for a time, been alone. The country was 
 densely peopled, and He may have passed on, slowly, from village to vil- 
 lage, opening His mission. The burden of His preaching was the same as 
 that of John. " The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand : 
 repent and believe in the Gospel." But though the same in form, the im- 
 port of the words in the mouth of .Tesus was very different from that of 
 their earlier utterance by His herald. John had striven to reform Israel 
 by demanding strict outward observances, as strict morality, but Jesus 
 went deeper, and required a revolution of the will and affections, flowing 
 from changed relations to God. He would have no new pieces on old 
 garments ; no new wine in old bottles ; no religious reform on the basis of 
 a compromise with formal Judaism. Israel had sunk into spiritual death, 
 in spite of its zeal for the precepts of the Eabbis, and the letter of the 
 Scriptures : its piety had degenerated largely into hypocritical affectation, 
 and merely lip and outward assent to the requirements of God's law. Its 
 mission to the great heathen world had become a failure. A wholly new 
 principle was needed to take the place of the now decayed and obsolete 
 dispensation of Moses ; the principle of direct personal responsibility to 
 God and spiritual freedom, instead of pi'iestly mediation and theocratic 
 slavery. Tlie Baptist v.^as, throughout, an upholder of the ceremonial law, 
 and had jio adequate conce])tion of a purely spiritual religion. It was re- 
 served to Jesus to teach that only a religious and moral new birth of Israel 
 and of humanity could avail. He was the first who founded a religion, 
 not on external precepts, or on a priesthood, or on sacrificial rites, but in 
 the living spirit; in individual personal conviction; in the free, loving 
 surrender of the will to God, as the eternal Truth and Good : a religion 
 which looked first, not at mere acts, but at what men were, and set no 
 value on actions apart from the motive from which they sprang. 
 
 Hence, the call to repentance was addressed to all without exception. 
 He recognised the difference between man and man, and acknowledged 
 the existence of possible good, even in the apparently hopeless. He spoke 
 of the good and evil, the righteous and unrighteous, the just and unjust, 
 those who had gone astray and those who had not ; of the sound and the 
 sick ; of the pure and the imjjure ; of green trees and dry ; of a good and 
 an evil eye, and of good soil and bad. Surveying men, as a whole, with a 
 calm and searching insight, He rejoiced in the light which shone in some
 
 346 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 souls in the midst of darkness around and witliin them, and acknowledged 
 its -worth. No cold fear of compromise damped His ardour ; frank joy 
 and radiant hopefulness, that detected good with instinctive quickness, 
 cheered His spirit to greater effort. It is, indeed, His glory that He led not 
 only the humble and penitent, but the openly evil, to a higher and purer life. 
 
 Yet, though thus wide in His charity, He had a standard by which all 
 men alike were pronounced sinful, and in need of rejientanco. In the 
 highest sense, God alone was good. Tried by this awful tost of com- 
 parison with Him, all men were " unclean," " coi^rupt," " dark," " blind," 
 " lustful," " selfish," worldly in thought, word, and act; dry trees, dead 
 and lost. All are pronounced in danger of the wrath of God. They may 
 ]3e more or less sinful in degree ; but all alike must seek forgiveness ; all 
 must repent and be changed, or perish. 
 
 Tluis, when comparing men with men, He recognised better and worse ; 
 l)iit before God, and in relation to citizenship in His kingdom. He acknow- 
 ledged no difference, but condemned all alike as sinners. Before the One 
 who alone is pure and holy, He humbles all. Ho will suffer no empty 
 pride in the presence of the Creator. In His sight no one is to be called 
 good. All are guilty, and even the best need pardon. In this view of 
 man He declared that He had not come to call the righteous but sinners 
 to repentance. Even the best of men, though righteous before their 
 fellows, are guilty before God. It is the unique characteristic of the 
 teaching of Jesus, that while He distinctly proclaims the moral differences 
 between man and man, He insists with supreme and unchangeable earnest- 
 ness on the infinite moral distance and contrast between the creature and 
 the Creator. All before Him are evil, or have evil in them. There may 
 be good among the bad, but sin is not wanting even in the best. The 
 repentance He preacked Avas the child-like humility which has no claim to 
 merit, but, conscious of its own weakness, resigns its will to the guidance 
 of God, and seeks His forgiveness. It has already entered His kingdom. 
 
 Nothing is told respecting the extent of this first northern missionary 
 tour, beyond the incidental remark that it embraced the towns and villages 
 thickly studded round the western shore of the Lake of Galilee. The 
 fame of His deeds at Jerusalem had everywhere preceded Him, and at- 
 tracted large crowds wherever He came. As yet He was alone, for His 
 early followers had returned to their calling of fishermen, at Bethsaida 
 and Capernaum. Beaching this neighbourhood after a time, an incident 
 occurred which once more drew them from their nets, and transformed 
 them into future apostles. 
 
 Jesus had risen early in the morning, as is the custom with Orientals, 
 and had gone out to the shore of the lake, which was close at hand. The 
 stillness of the morning promised temporary relief from the crowds who 
 daily thronged Him, and a much needed interval for peaceful solitude. 
 But there was, henceforth, no rest for the Son of Man. The people were 
 already afoot, and had hurried out to the beach, in numbers, "to hear 
 the Word of God;" for they recognised Him as speaking with Divine 
 authority, like John, or one of the prophets. Unable to advance, and 
 willing to feed these " sheep of the House of Israel," He turned towards
 
 OPENINCr OF THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. 347 
 
 two boats drawn up on the white beach ; the fishermen having come ashore, 
 after a fruitless night's hibour, to wash and mend their nets. The one 
 boat was that of His old disciples Peter and Andrew, the other, that of 
 James and John, who with their father Zebedec, and some hired men, were 
 busy prcjoaring for the next evening's venture. To meet again must have 
 been as pleasant to their Master as themselves, and their lowly occupation 
 must have lost its charm at the recollection of the time v.'hen thoy had 
 shared His society. Entering into Peter's boat, and asking him to thrust 
 out a little from the land, that He might have freedom to address the 
 people, He sat down, as was usual with the Rabbis when they taught, and 
 spoke to the crowd standing on the shore. The clear rijipling water 
 playing gently round the boat ; the fields, and vineyards, and olive groves 
 behind ; the eager listeners, with their varied and picturesque Eastern 
 dress ; the wondrous Preacher ; the calmness and delicious coolness of 
 morning, and, over all, the cloudless Sj-rian sky, must have made the 
 scene striking in the extreme. 
 
 The iDublic addresses of the Rabbis were always very short, and so, 
 doubtless, were those of Jesus. The people were soon dismissed, and 
 wandered off, to discuss, as Jewish congregations oiways d.id, the sayings 
 they had heard. Bnt Jesus had received a service, in the use of His 
 strange pulpit, and wished to repay it, as only He could. Telling Peter, 
 the steersman of the boat, to push off into the deep vv^ater. He bade him 
 and his brother let down the net. It was a circular one, cast from the 
 boat, and then dragged slowly behind, towards the shore. The fish in the 
 Sea of Galilee must always have been very abundant, even when the 
 fisheries were so active, for, at this day, their number can scarcely be 
 conceived by those who have not been on the spot. The shoals freqixently 
 cover an acre of the lake, or even more, and the fish, as they slowly move 
 along the surface, with their back fins just seen on the level of the water, 
 roughen it so that it looks, a short way off, as if beaten by a heavy shower. 
 But Simon and liis brother had had no success, though they had spent the 
 night, when fishing is best, in fruitless efforts. There was no hesitation, 
 however, in obeying the command, and they had hardly done so, when 
 they ^wept into a shoal, and had to beckon to James and John, their j^ai-t- 
 ners, to come quickly, and save their net from breaking with the catch. 
 Even then, however, the two boats were loaded to the water's edge, and 
 seemed as if they would sink. 
 
 Peter, ever impulsive, could not restrain his feelings at such an incident 
 — so unexpected, so grateful. He who had wrought so great a wonder 
 must have unknown and inconceivable powers, before which man, guilty 
 as he feels himself, might well be afraid. Falling down at the feet of 
 Jesus, he could only utter the words — " Depart from me, for I am a sinful 
 man, Lord." Nor were his companions less astonished at the miracle. 
 But Jesus had a high purpose with these simple, open-hearted friends. 
 They had shown their sjanpathy of spirit with Him already, and now He 
 designed to attach them permanently to His service. " Fear not," said 
 He ; " come after Me ; from henceforth I will make you fishers of men. 
 You catcli the fish to their death ; you will take men alive, to save them
 
 348 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 from death, and give them eternal life." It was enough. Words so apt 
 had their effect. From that moment the £onr were His devoted follov/ers. 
 The rich gain they would have jn-ized so highly but an hour before, had 
 lost its charm. Called to decide, there and then, as a proof of their meet- 
 ness for discipleship, they forsook all, and followed Him at once. 
 
 The few who had first joined Christ, and by doing so had shown tlieir 
 fitness for His special intimacy and confidence, were thus, once more 
 gathered round Him, and lived with Him henceforth, apparently in the 
 same dwelling, on a nearer and more tender footing than any He after- 
 wards received. They had often heard Him speak of the kingdom of God; 
 of the need of faith in Himself and of a sincere religious spirit, as the 
 conditions of entering it, and they yearned for closer intercourse Avith 
 Him, that they might learn more respecting it. Their instant obedience 
 showed their devotion. All that had hitherto engaged their thoughts and 
 care,— their boats, their nets, their fishing gear, their daily toil for daily 
 bread, — were left behind. They placed themselves, henceforth, under the 
 higher authority of G od Himself ; ready at any time to se]3arate themselves 
 even from their families, in the interest of the new Kingdom. Jesus had 
 drawn them to Himself as they were to draw others, not by craft or force, 
 but by the power of His living words and the s]3irit of love. Their loyalty 
 was free and spontaneous. The calm greatness of the character of Christ 
 shines out in such an unpretending beginning, as the germ and centre of a 
 movement which is to revolutionize the world. But insignificant as it 
 might seem, it was only so when judged by a human standard. Tainted 
 by no selfislmess, weak ambition, or love of power, the four siinple, child- 
 like, uncorruj^ted natures, touched with the love of Heavenly Truth, and 
 eager to win others to embrace it, Avere living spiritual forces, destined by 
 a law of nature to repeat themselves in ever wider circles, through suc- 
 cessive generations. 
 
 The fishermen and sailors of the Lake of Galilee were a numerous and 
 redoubted class, with something of the feeling of a clan. In the last 
 Jewish war we find them, under the leadership of Jesus son of Sapphias, 
 seizing Tiberias, and burning and plundering the great palace of Antipas. 
 Of the four who had now definitely cast in their lot Avith Christ, Peter and 
 Andrew Avcre apparently poor ; James and John, in a better position. For 
 the convenience of trade, both families had left the neighbouring toAvn 
 of Bethsaida, and had settled in Capernaum, one of the centres of the local 
 fisheries, and of the occupations connected with them. Peter alone seems 
 to have been married, and in his house Jesus henceforth found a home, as 
 perhaps He had done on His former short stay. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 
 CAPERNAUM. 
 
 rriHE final "call" addressed to Peter and his brother, and to James and 
 
 John, at the Lake of Galilee, apparently insignificant as an event, 
 
 proved to have been, in reality, one of the turning points in the history
 
 CArERNAUM. 349 
 
 of the world. Tlio "call" of Abraham bad given tbc world, as an ever- 
 lasthig inheritance, the grand truth of a Living Personal God; that of 
 Moses bad created a nation, in which the active government of human 
 affairs by one God was to be illustrated, and His will made known directly 
 to mankind: but tbat of the poor Galitean fishermen was the foundation 
 of a Society, for which all that had preceded it was only the preparation ; 
 a Society in which all that was merely outward and temporary in the 
 relations of God to man, should be laid aside, and all that was imperfect 
 and material replaced by the perfect, spiritual, and abiding. Tbe true 
 theocracy, towards which mankind had been slowly advancing, through 
 ages, had received its first overt establishment, when Peter heard, on his 
 knees, the summons of Jesus to follow Him, and had, with the others, at 
 once from the heart, obeyed. Henceforth, it only remained to extend the 
 kingdom thus founded, by winning the consciences of men to the same 
 devotion, by the annoiincement of the Fatherhood of God, and the need 
 of seeking His favour by repentance and faith in His Divine Son ; leading 
 to a holy life, of which that of Jesus, as the Saviour-Messiah, was the 
 realized ideal. 
 
 From the shores of the lake, Christ went to the house of Peter, accepting 
 his invitation to share his hospitality. 
 
 The little town itself, with its two or three thousand inhabitants, was 
 surrounded by a wall, and lay partly along the shore ; some of the houses 
 close to the water ; others with a garden between it and them. The black 
 lava or basalt, of which all were built, was universally whitewashed, so 
 that the town was seen to fine effect, from a distance, through the green 
 of its numerous trees and gardens. Peter's household consisted of his 
 wife and her mother — doubtless a widow — whom his kindly nature had 
 brought to this second home, Andrew his brother, and now, of Jesus, his 
 guest. James and John, probably, still lived with their father in Caper- 
 naum, and the whole four followed their calling in the intervals of attend- 
 ing their new Master. 
 
 It appears to have been on a Friday that Jesus summoned Peter and 
 his companions. The day passed, doubtless, in further work for the 
 Kingdom. As the sun set, the beginning of the Sabbath was announced 
 by three blasts of a trumpet, from the roof of the spacious synagogue of 
 the town, which the devout commandant of the garrison, though not a 
 Jew, had built for the people. The first blast wai'ned the peasants, in the 
 far-stretching vineyards and gardens, to cease their toil ; the second was 
 the signal for the townsfolk to close their business for the week ; and the 
 third, for all to kindle the holy Sabbath light, which was to burn till the 
 sacred day was past. It was the early spring, and the days were still 
 short, for even in summer it is hardly morning twilight, in Palestine, at 
 four, and the light is gone by eight. Jesus did not, however, go that 
 night to Peter's house, but spent the hours in solitary devotion. We can 
 fancy, from what is elsewhere told us, that the day closed while He still 
 spoke to a listening crowd, under some palm-tree or by the wayside. As 
 the moon rose beyond the hills, on the other side of the lake. He would 
 dismiss His hearers, with words of comfort and a greeting of peace, and
 
 350 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 then turn to the silent hilly behind, to be alone with His Heavenly Father, 
 On their lonely heights, the noise of men lay far beneath Him, and Ho 
 could find rest after the toils of the day. A wide panorama of land and 
 water stretched away on all sides in the white moonlight. He M'as Him- 
 self its centre, and gazed on it with inexpressible sympathy and emotion. 
 We can imagine Him spreading out His arms, as if to take it all to Hia 
 heart, and then prostrating Himself, as ib were with it, before God, to 
 intercede for it with the Eternal; His brow touching the earth in lowly 
 abasement, while He pleaded for man as His friend and brother, in words 
 of infinite love and tenderness. " Eising, erelong, in strong emotion, it 
 would seem as if He held up the world in His lifted hands, to offer it to 
 His Father. He spoke, was silent, then spoke again. His prayer was 
 holy inter-communion with God. At first low and almost in a whisper, 
 His voice gi-adually became loud and joyous, till it echoed back from the 
 rocks around Him. Thus the night passed, till morning broke and found 
 Him, once more in silent devotion, prostrate as if overcome ; but the dawn 
 of day was the signal for His rising, and passing doAvn again to the abodes 
 of men." 
 
 The morning service in the synagogue began at nine, and as the news 
 of the great Rabbi being in the neighlwurhood had spread, every one 
 strove to attend, in hopes of seeing Him. Women came to it by back 
 streets, as was required of them; the men, with slow Sabbath steps, 
 gathered in great numbers. The elders had taken their seats, and the 
 Ecader had recited the Eighteen Prayers — the congregation answering 
 with their Amen — for though the prayers might be abridged on other 
 days, they could not be shortened on the Sabbath. ISText came the first 
 lesson for the day, the people rising and turning reverently towards the 
 Shrine, and chanting the words after the Eeader. Another lesson then 
 followed, and the Eeader, at its close, called on Jesus, as a Eabbi present 
 in the congregation, to speak from the passage to the people. 
 
 His words must have sounded strangely new and attractive, for, apart 
 from their vividness and force, they spoke of matters of the most vital 
 interest, which the Eabbis left wholly untouched. He had founded the 
 Kingdom of God, and now sought to build it up by realizing its conditions 
 in the souls of men, who should each, forthwith, be living centres of 
 influence on others. But a course so retired and unknown to the world at 
 large, as that which He followed, of speaking to modest assemblies in 
 local synagogues, makes it easy to understand how His life might be 
 overlooked by the public writers of the age. Tet, in the little world in 
 which He moved, the noiseless agency by which He carried on His work 
 created an intense impression. He gave old truths an unwonted freshness 
 of presentation, and added much that sounded entirely new, on His own 
 authority, instead of confining Himself, like the Eabbis, to lifeless repeti- 
 tions of traditional commonplaces, delivered with a dread of the least 
 deviation or originality. They claimed no power to say a word of their 
 own ; He spoke with a startling independence. Their synagogue sermons, 
 as Ave see in the Book of Jubilees, were a tiresome iteration of the minutest 
 Rabbinical rules, with a serious importance which regarded them as the
 
 CAPERNAUM.. 351 
 
 basis of all moral order. The kind and quality of -wood for tlie altar ; the 
 infinite details of the law of tithes; the moral dcadliuess of the use of 
 blood ; or the indispensableness of circumcision on the eighth day, were 
 urged with passionate zeal as momentous and fundamental truths. The 
 morality and religion of the age had sunk thus low, and hence, the fervid 
 Avords of Jesus, stirring the depths of the heart, created pi-ofound excite- 
 ment in Capernaum. Men were amazed at the phenomenon of novelty, in 
 a religious sphere so imchangeably conservative as that of the synagogue. 
 "New teaching," said one to the other, "and with authority— not like 
 other Eabbis. They only repeat the old : this man takes on Him to speak 
 without reference to the past." But if they were astonished at His teach- 
 ing, they were still more so at the power wliich He revealed in connection 
 with it. Among those who had gone to the synagogue that morning was 
 an unhap]iy man, the victim of a calamity incident apparently to the age 
 of Christ and the Apostles only. He was '"'possessed by a spirit of an 
 unclean demon." Our utter ignorance of the spiritual world leaves the 
 significance of such words a mystery, though the popular idea of the time 
 is handed down by the Rabbis. An unclean demon, in the language of 
 Christ's day, was an evil spirit that drove the person possessed, to haunt 
 burial-places and other spots most unclean in the eyes of Jews. There 
 were men who affected the black art, pretending, like the witch of Endor, 
 to raise the dead, and, for that end, lodging in tombs, and macerating 
 themselves with fasting, to secure the fuller aid and inspiration of such 
 evil spirits ; and others into vAom the demons entered, driving them 
 involuntarily to these dismal habitations. Both classes were regarded as 
 under the power of this order of beings, but it is not told us to which of 
 the two the person present in the synagogue belonged. 
 
 The service had gone on apparently without interruption till Jesus 
 began to speak. Then, however, a paroxysm seized the unhappy man. 
 Eising in the midst of the congregation, a wild howl of demoniacal frenzy 
 burst from him, that must have frozen the blood of all with horror. 
 " Ha ' " yelled the demon. " What have we to do with Thee, Jesus, the 
 Nazarene ? Thou comest to destroy us ! I know Thee, who Thou art ; 
 the Holy One of God ! " Among the crowd Jesus alone remained calm. 
 He would not have acknowledgment of His Messiahship from such a 
 source. " Hold thy peace," said He, indignantly, " and come out of him." 
 The spirit felt its Master, and that it must obey, but, demon to the last, 
 threw the man down in the midst of the congregation, tearing him as it 
 did so, and then, Avith a wild howl, fled out of him. Nothing could have 
 happened better fitted to impress the audience favourably towards Jesus. 
 "This new teaching," said they amongst themselves, "is with authority. 
 It cai'ries its warrant with it." 
 
 So startling an incident had broken up the service for the time, and 
 Jesus retired, with His four disciples, and the rest of the congregation. 
 But His day's work of mercy had only begun. Arriving at His modest 
 homo, he found the mother of Peter's wife struck down with a violent 
 attack of tlie local fever for which Capernaum had so bad a notoriety. 
 The quantity of marsliy land in the neighbourhood, especially at the en-
 
 352 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 trance of tlic Jordan into the lake, had made fever of a very malignant 
 type at times the characteristic of the locality, so that the physicians 
 would not allow Josephus, when hurt by his horse sinking in the neigh- 
 bouring marsh, to sleep even a single night in Capernaum, but hurried 
 him on to TarichcT3a. It was not to bo thonght that He who had just sent 
 joy and healing into the heart of a stranger, would withhold His aid when 
 a friend recpiired it. The anxious relatives forthwith besought His help, 
 but the gentlest hint would have sufficed. It mattered not that it was 
 fever : He was forthwith in the chamber, bending over the sick woman, 
 and rebuking the disease as if it had been an evil personality. He took her 
 by the hand, doubtless with a look and words which made her His for 
 ever, and gently raising her, she found the fever gone and health and 
 strength returned, so that she could prepare the midday meal for her 
 household and their wondrous guest. 
 
 The strict laws of the Jewish Sabbath gave a few hours of rest to all, 
 but the blast of the trnmpet which announced its close was the signal for 
 a renewal of the popular excitement, now increased by the rumour of a 
 second miracle. With the setting of the sun it was once more lawful to 
 move beyond the two thousand paces of a Sabbath-day's journej', and to 
 carry whatever burdens one pleased. Forthwith, began to gather from 
 every street, and from the thickly sown towns and villages round, the 
 strangest assemblage. The child led its blind father as near the enclosure 
 of Simon's house as the throng permitted : the father came carrjdng the 
 sick child ; men bore the helpless in swinging hammocks ; " all that had 
 any sick, with whatever disease," brought them to the Great Healer. The 
 whole town was in motion, and crowded before the house. What the sick 
 of even a small town implied may be imagined. Fevers, convulsions, 
 asthma, wasting consumption, swollen dropsy, shaking palsy, the deaf, the 
 dumb, the brain-affected, and, besides all, " many that were possessed 
 ^vith devils," that last, worst symptom of the despairing misery and dark 
 confusion of the times. 
 
 Would He leave them as they were ? They had taken it for granted 
 that He would pity them, for was He not a Prophet of God, and was it 
 not natural that, like Elijah or Elisha, the greatest of the prophets, the 
 power of God might be present to heal those who were bronght to Him ? 
 Already, moreover, His characteristics had won the confidence of the 
 simple crowd. There must have been a mysterious sympathy and good- 
 ness in His looks, and words, and even in His bearing, that seemed to 
 beckon the wretched to Him as their friend, and that conquered all un- 
 corrupted hearts. It had drawn His disciples from the interests of gain, 
 to follow Him in His poverty ; it melted into tears the woman that was a 
 sinner ; it softened the hard nature of publicans ; and drew hundreds of 
 Aveary and heavy-laden to Him for rest. Those who could, gathered 
 wherever they might hope to find Him, and as it was this evening, those 
 who could not move, had themselves carried into His presence. As many 
 as could, strove to touch, if it were possible, even His clothes ; others con- 
 fessed their sins aloud, and owned that their illness was the punishment 
 from God. One would not venture to ask Him to come to his house ;
 
 CAPERNAUM. 353 
 
 another brought Him in that He might be, as it were, constrained to help. 
 The bbnd cried out to Him from the roadside, and the woman of Canaan 
 followed Him in spite of His hard words. When He came near, even 
 those possessed felt His Divine greatness. Trembling in cxevj limb, they 
 would fain have fled, but felt rooted to the spot, the evil spirits owning, in 
 wild shrieks, the presence of One whose goodness was torment, and before 
 whose will they must yield up their prey. 
 
 The sight of so much misery crowding for relief touched Jesus at once, 
 and He soon appeared at the open door, before the excited crowd. With 
 a command, " Hold thy peace, and come out of him," a poor demoniac was 
 presently in his right mind. The helpless lame stood u^j at the words " I 
 say unto thee, Arise." The paralytic left his conch, at the sound of " Take 
 U13 thy bed and walk." To some. He had a word of comfort that dispelled 
 alarm and drove oft" its secret cause. " Be it to thee according to thy 
 faith." " Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity." " Be of good 
 cheer, my son, thy sins are forgiven thee," was enough to turn sorrow and 
 pain into joy and health. Erelong He had spoken to all some word of 
 mercy. The blind left with their sight restored ; the possessed thanked 
 God for their restoration ; the fever-stricken felt the glow of returning 
 vigour ; the dumb shouted His praises ; and thus the strange crowd went 
 off one by one, leaving the house once more in the silence of the night. 
 No wonder the Evangelist saw in such an evening a fulfilment of the 
 words of the prophet, "Himself took our infirmities and bore our diseases." 
 
 It was not, however, by popular excitement and mere outward healing 
 that the kingdom of God was to be spread, but by the still and gentle in- 
 fluence of the Truth, working conviction in individual souls. The noisy 
 crowd; the thronging numbers of diseased and suffering; the curiosity 
 that ran after excitement, and the yearning for help which looked only to 
 outward healing, troubled and almost alarmed Him. He had come to 
 found a Spiritual Society, of men changed in heart towards God, and filled 
 with faith in Himself as its Head; and the merely extei'nal and mostly 
 selfish notions of the multitude could not escape His keen eyes. His 
 Divine love and pity sighed over the bodily and mental distress around. 
 But, as a rule, the sufferers thought only of their outward misery, in 
 melancholy ignorance of its secret source in their own sin and guilt before 
 God, and felt no wants besides, when their bodily troubles were removed. 
 
 In one aspect, indeed, these miraculous cures furthered the great pur- 
 pose of Jesus. They might prove no doctrine ; for mere power could not 
 establish moral and spiritual truth. Miracles might possibly be wrought 
 by other influences than Divine, and they left religious teaching to stand 
 on its own merits, for they appealed only to the senses ; not, like truth, to 
 the soul. The display of overwhelming power might almost seem, indeed, 
 to endanger, rather than promote, the higher aim of Jesus ; to win those 
 whom He addressed. It awes and repels men to find themselves in the 
 presence of forces Avhicli they can neither resist nor understand. Ignorant 
 minds tremble before powers which may be used to destroy them, and 
 seek to win their favour by the flattery of worship ; surrounding even 
 human despotism Avith awful attributes, Ijefore which they cower in terror. 
 
 A A
 
 354 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Jesus, however, could appciil to His miraculous i^owers as evideuccs of 
 His Divine mission, and often did so. Their vahic lay in the grandeur 
 they added to His character. Even in the wilderness, He had refused to 
 exert them, under any circumstances, either for His natural wants, or for 
 His personal ends, and He adhered to this amazing self-restraint through 
 His whole career. It was seen from tho first, that His awful powers were 
 uniformly beneficent ; that He came, not to destroy men's lives, but to 
 save them ; that He used omnipotence to bless, but never to hurt. His 
 words, His bearing, and His looks of Divine love and tenderness, doubtless 
 predisposed men to expect this, and His uniform course soon confirmed it. 
 They saw that nothing could disturb His absolute patience, or rouse Him 
 to vindictiveness. They heard Him endure meekly the most contemp- 
 tuous sneers, the bitterest criticism, and the most rancorous hostility. No 
 one denied His miraculous powers, though some affected to call them 
 demoniac, in direct contradiction to their habitual exercise for the holiest 
 ends. But they were so invariably devoted to the good of others, and so 
 entirely held in restraint, as regarded personal ends, that men gradually 
 came to treat Him with the reckless boldness of hatred, notwithstanding 
 such awful endowment. 
 
 Round one so transcendently meek, self-interest found no motive for 
 gatherhig. He who with such possibilities would do nothing for Himself, 
 could not bo expected to do more for the personal ends of others. 
 Hypocrisy had nothing to gain by seeking His favour. Only sincerity 
 found Him attractive. But, on the other hand, with the uncorrupted and 
 worthy, this characteristic gave Him unlimited moral elevation. ISTo 
 more sublime sjDcctacle can be conceived than boundless power, kept in 
 perfect control, for ends wholly unselfish and noble. Condescension wins 
 admiration when it is only from man to man ; when it showed itself in 
 veiled Omnipotence, ever ready to bless others, but never used on its own 
 l)ehalf, it became a Divine ideal. Men saw Him clothed with power over 
 disease, and even over death ; able to cast forth spirits, or to still the sea ; 
 and yet accessible, full of sympathy ; the lofty patriot, the tender friend, 
 the patient counsellor; shedding tears, at times, from a full heart, and 
 ever ready with a wise and gentle word for all ; so unaffected and gentle 
 that children drew round Him with a natural instinct, and even worldly 
 hardness and vice were softened before Him ; and this contrast of super- 
 human power, and perfect humility, made them feel that He was indeed 
 the Head of the Kingdom of God amongst men. The secret of His amaz- 
 ing success, as the founder of a now religious constitution for mankind, 
 lay in the recognition of this perfect sacrifice of One so immeasurably 
 great, culminating in " the death of the cross." It was the jierfoct reali- 
 zation, in Himself, of tho life He urged on others. It implied the ideal 
 fulfilment of all human duties, and no less so, of all Divine ; for tho 
 heavenly love which alone could dictate and sustain such a career, was, in 
 itself, the most perfect transcript of the nature of God. A life in which 
 every step showed kingly grace and divinely boundless love, condescend- 
 ing to the lowliest self-denial for the good of man, proclaimed Him the 
 rightful Head of tho ]S^cw Kni adorn of God.
 
 CAPERNAUM. 355 
 
 The ni<]jhfc which followed this bu.sy aud eventful Sabbath brought no 
 repose to His body or mind. Tlio excitement around agitated and dis- 
 turbed Him. It was His first triumpbant success ; for, in the south, He 
 had met with little sympathy, though He had attracted crowds. But 
 curiosity was not pi'ogress, and excitement was not conversion. Lowli- 
 ness and concealment, not noisy throngs, were the true conditions of His 
 work, and of its firmest establishment and lasting glory. Mere popularity 
 was, moreover, a renewed temptation ; for, as a man. He was susceptible 
 of the same seductions as His brethren. He might be drawn aside to 
 think of Himself, and to His holy soul the faintest approach to this was 
 a surrender to evil. Eising from His couch, therefore, while the dee]i 
 darkness which precedes the dawn still rested on hill and valley, He left 
 the house so quietly tnat no one heard Him, and went, once more, to the 
 solitudes of the hills behind the town. Passing through groves of palms, 
 and orchards of fig and olive trees, intermixed with vineyards and grassy 
 meadows, with their tinkling brooks, so delightful in the East, and their 
 unseen glory of lilies and varied flowers, He soon reached the heights, 
 amongst which, at no great distance from the town, were lonely ravines 
 where He could enjoy perfect seclusion. In the stillness of nature He 
 was alone with His Father, and far from the temptations which troubled 
 the pure simplicity of His soul, and His lowly meekness before God and 
 man. We now see the glory of the path He chose ; but while He lived, 
 even His disciples would have planned a very different course. Why not 
 take advantage of the excitement of the people to rouse the whole nation, 
 as John had done ? Was not His miraculous power a means of endless 
 benefit to men, and should it not, therefore, be made the great feature of 
 His work? Vanity would have suggested plausible grounds for using 
 His gifts in a way, that, in reality, was not in harmony with the great end 
 of His mission. But His soul remained unsullied, like the stainless light. 
 He came to do the will of His Father, and nothing could make Him for a 
 moment think of Himself. In lonely communion with His own soul, and 
 earnest prayer, the rising breath of temptation passed once more away. 
 
 Peter and Andrew, discovering His absence, when they awoke, were at 
 a loss what to think. More sick persons were gathering, and the crowds 
 of yesterday promised to be larger to-day. Hasting to the hills, to which 
 they rightly supposed He had retired, and having at last found Him, they 
 fancied He would at once return with them, on hearing that the whole 
 people were seeking Him. But He had a wider sphere than Capernaum, 
 and higher duties than mere bodily healing. " I have not come to heal 
 the sick," said He, " but to announce and spread the Kingdom of God. 
 All I do is subordinate to this. Let us, therefore, go to the neighbouring 
 towns, for I must preach the Kingdom of God to other cities, as well as t*; 
 Capernaum." ISTor would He be persuaded to return for a time, though 
 some of the people had already found out His retreat, and joined with the 
 disciples in begging Him to do so. 
 
 The circuit now begun was the first of a series, in which Jesus visited 
 every part of Galilee, preaching and teaching in the synagogue of each 
 town that had one, and often, doubtless, in the open air. It wais the briglit
 
 356 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 and sunny time of the year, when the harvest was quickly ripening. The 
 heat was ah-cady oppressive at noon, but the mornings and evenings per- 
 mitted more easy travelling. It was a season of intense labour for the 
 Saviour, of which the day's work in Capernaum was only a sample. The 
 bounds of Galileo embraced the many villages and towns of the Plain 
 of Esdraclon, and the whole of tho hilly country north of it, almost to 
 Lebanon. Day by day brought its march from one village or town to 
 others, over the thirsty limestone uplands, where the wanderer thankfully 
 received the cup of cold water, as a gift to be recompensed in the Kingdom 
 of God, or through glowing vineyards, or among the cornfields whitening 
 to the liarvcst, or falling under the sickle of the reaper. " Every day," 
 said Jesus to His disciples, " has its own troubles ; " for weariness ; 
 possibly, at times, hunger ; the dependence on hospitality for shelter ; the 
 pressure of crowds ; the stolid indifference of too many ; the idle curiosity 
 of more ; the ever-present misery of disease in all its forms ; and, it may 
 be, even thus early, the opposition of some, must have borne heavily on a 
 nature like His. The news of His miracles had spread like runuiug fire 
 through the whole country, and attracted crowds from all parts. Beyond 
 Palestine, on the north, they had become the common talk of Syria; on 
 the east, they had stirred the population of the wide district of the Ten 
 Cities, and of Perea; and, on the south. His name was on all lips in Jeru- 
 salem and Ji;dea. Erelong, it seemed as if the scenes of John's preaching 
 were returning; for numbers gathered to Him from all these parts, and 
 followed Him, day by day, in His movements through the land. His 
 progress was, indeed, worthy of such an attendance, for no king ever 
 celebrated such a triumph. Conquerors returning from victory over 
 kingdoms and empires had led columns of tremlaling captives in their 
 train. Bnt, at every resting-place, a sad crowd of sufferers from all dis- 
 eases and painful affections, and of demoniacs, lunatics, and paralytics, 
 was gathered in the path of Jesus, and He healed them by a word or a 
 touch. Escorted into each town by those whom He had thus restored — 
 the lately sick and dying whom He had instantaneously cured — it is no 
 wonder that the whole land rang with the story. The enemies over whom 
 He triumphed were pain, and sickness, and death, and the rejoicings that 
 greeted Him were shouts of gratitude and blessing as the Prince of Life. 
 
 Only one incident of this wondrous journey is recorded at any length. 
 In one of the cities He visited. He was suddenly met by a man " full of 
 1 leprosy ; " a disease at all times terrible, but aggravated, in the opinion 
 of that day, by the belief that it was a direct " stroke of G-od," as a punish- 
 ment for special sins. It began with little specks on the eyelids, and on 
 the palms of the hand, and gradually spread over different parts of the 
 body, bleaching the hair white wherever it showed itself, crusting the 
 affected pai-ts with shining scales, and causing swellings and sores. From 
 the skin it slowly ate its way through the tissues, to the bones and joints 
 and even to the marrow, rotting the whole body piecemeal. Tho lungs, 
 the organs of speech and hearing, and the eyes were attacked in turn, till, 
 at last, consumjition or dropsy brought welcome death. Dread of infection 
 kept men aloof from the sufferer, and the Law proscribed him, as, above
 
 CAPEENAUM. 357 
 
 all ineu, unclean. The disease was hereditary to the fourth generation. 
 No one thus afflicted could remain in a walled town, though he might live ^ 
 in a village. There were different A"arieties of leprosy, but all were 
 dreaded as the saddest calamity of life. The leper was required to rend 
 his outer garment, to go bareheaded, and to cover his mouth so as to hide 
 his beard, as was done in lamentation for the dead. He had, further, to 
 waru passers by away from him bj' the crj^ of " Unclean, unclean ; " not 
 without the thought that the sound would call forth a prayer for the 
 sufferer, and less from the fear of infection, than to prevent contact with 
 one thus visited by God, and unclean. He coidd not speak to any one, or 
 receive or return a salutation. In the lapse of ages, however, these rules 
 had been in some degree relaxed. A leper might live in an open village, 
 with any one willing to receive him and to become unclean for his sake, 
 and he might enter the synagogue, if he had a part specially partitioned 
 off for himself, and was the first to enter the building, and the last to 
 leave. He even at times ventured to enter a town, though forbidden 
 under the penalty of forty stripes. But it was a living death, in the slow 
 advance of which a man became daily more loathsome to himself, and to 
 his dearest friends. " These four are counted as dead," says the Talmud, 
 " the blind, the leper, the poor, and the childless." 
 
 The news of the wondrous cures wrought on so many had reached the 
 unfortunate man, v.'ho now dared the Law, to make his way to the Healer. 
 Falling at His feet in humble reverence, he delighted the spirit of Jesus 
 by, perhaps, the first open confession of a simple and lowly faith—" Lord, 
 if Thou wilt. Thou canst make me clean." To kneel before Him, and 
 address Him by such a title, was, indeed, only what he would have done to 
 any one greatly above him ; but such frank belief in His power, and im- 
 plicit submission to His will, touched the tender heart of Christ. Moved 
 with compassion for the unfortunate, there was no delay — a touch of the 
 hand, and the words, " I will : be thou clean," and he rose, a leper no 
 longer. To have touched him, was, in the eyes of a Jew, to have made I 
 Himself unclean, but He had come to break through the deadly externalisni / 
 that had taken the place of true religion, and could have shown no more 
 strikingly how He looked on mere Eabbinical precej^ts than by making a 
 touch which, till then, had entailed the worst uncleanness, the means of 
 cleansing. Slight though it seemed, the putting the hand on a leper was 1 
 the proclamation that .Judaism was abrogated henceforth. 
 
 The popular excitement had already extended widely, and a cure like 
 this was certain to raise it still higher. With the Baptist in prison on a 
 pretended political charge, and the people full of political dreams in con- 
 nection with the expected Messiah, all that might fan the flame was to be 
 dreaded. Excitement, moreover, was unfavourable to the great work of 
 Christ. He needed a thoughtful calm in the mind, for lasting effects. 
 The kingdom of God which He proclaimed was no mere appeal to the 
 feelings, but sought the understanding and heart. Turning to the ncAvly 
 cured, therefore, He counselled him earnestly not to tell any one what had 
 happened, threatening him with His anger, if he should disobey. " Go to 
 Jerusalem," said He, " and show yourself to the priest, and make the
 
 358 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 olferiugs for your cleansing, required by the Law, as a proof to your 
 neighbours, to the priests, the scribes, and the people at large, that you 
 are really clean." 
 
 A certificate of the recovery of a leper could only be given at Jerusalem, 
 by a priest, after a lengthened examination and tedious rites, and, no 
 doubt, these were duly undergone and performed. To describe them will 
 illustrate the " bondage " of the ceremonial law, as then in force. With 
 his heart full of the first joy of a cure so amazing, for no one had ever 
 before heard of the recovery of a man " full of leprosy," he set o£E to the 
 Temple for the requisite papers to authorize his return, once more, to the 
 roll of Israel. A tent had to be pitched outside the city, and in this the 
 jiriest examined the leper, cutting off all his hair with the utmost care, for 
 if only two hairs were left, the ceremony was invalid. Two sparrows had 
 to be brought at this first stage of the cleansing ; the one, to be killed over 
 a small earthen pan of water, into which its blood must drop ; the other, 
 after being sprinkled with the blood of its mate, — a cedar twig, to which 
 scarlet wool and a piece of hyssop were bound, being nsed to do so, — was 
 let free in such a direction that it should fly to the open country. After 
 the scrutiny by the priest, the leper put on clean clothes, and carried away 
 to a running stream those he had worn, to wash them thoroughly, and to 
 cleanse himself by a bath. He could now go into the city, but for seven 
 days more could not enter his own house. On the eighth day after, he 
 once more submitted to the scissors of the priest, who cut off whatever 
 hair might have grown in the interval. Then followed a second bath, and 
 now he had only carefully to avoid any defilement, so as to be fit to attend 
 in the Temple next morning, and complete his cleansing. The first step 
 in this final purification was to offer three lambs, two males and a female, 
 none of which must be under a year old. Standing at the outer edge of 
 the court of the men, which he was not yet worthy to enter, the leper 
 waited the longed-for rites. These began by the priest taking one of the 
 male lambs destined to be slain as an atonement for the leper, and leading 
 it to each point of the compass in turn, and by his swinging a vessel of oil 
 on all sides, in the same way, as if to offer both to the universally present 
 God. He then led the lamb to the leper, who laid his hands on its head, 
 and gave it over as a sacrifice for his guilt, which he now confessed. It 
 was forthwith killed at the north side of the altar, two priests catching its 
 l)lood, the one in a vessel, the other in his hand. The first now sprinkled 
 the altar with the blood, while the other went to the leper and anointed his 
 ears, his right thumb, and his right toe with it. The one priest then 
 poured some oil of the leper's offering into the left hand of the other, who, 
 in his turn, dipped his finger seven times into the oil thus held, and 
 sprinkled it as often towards the Holy of Holies. Each part of the leper 
 which before had been touched with the blood, was then further anointed 
 with the oil, what remained being poured or wiped off on his head. 
 
 The leper could now enter the men's court, and did so, passing through 
 it to that of the priests. The female lamb was next killed as a sin-offering, 
 after he had put his hands on its head, part of its blood being smeared on 
 the horns of the altar, while the rest was poured out at the altar base.
 
 LIGHT AND DARKNESS. 359 
 
 The other malo laiiil) was then slahi for a Ijuriit sacrifice ; the leper once 
 more layuig liis hands on its head, and the }3riest sprinlding its blood on 
 the altar. The fat, and all that was fit for an olfcring, was now laid on 
 the altar, and burned as a " sweet smelling savour " to Clod. A meat 
 offering of fine wheat meal and oil ended tlie whole ; a portion being laid 
 on the altar, while the rest, with the two lambs, of which only a small 
 part had been burned, formed the dues of the priest. It was not till all 
 this had been done that the full ceremony of cleansing, or showing himself 
 to the priest, had been carried out, and that the cheering words, " Thou 
 art jiure," restored the sufferer once more to the rights of citizenship and 
 of intercourse with his follows. No wonder that even a man like St. Peter, 
 so tenderly minded to his ancestral religion, should speak of its require- 
 ments as a yoke which " neither our fathers nor Ave are able to bear." 
 
 Of the after-history of the leper thus cleansed we are not informed. It 
 apjjears, however, that his joy at being healed was too great to be repressed 
 even by Christ's grave imposition of silence. Tlie multitudes around 
 Jesns would soon, of themselves, spread news of the miracle, but the cured 
 man widened and heightened the excitement by telling everywhere, on his 
 road to Jerusalem, what had befallen him. The result was that Jesus 
 could no longer enter a town or city, so great was the commotion His 
 presence excited. Nor was it of any avail that He retired to the open 
 country, for even when He betook Himself to the upland solitudes, great 
 multitudes continually sought Him out, either to hear His words, or to be 
 healed of their various diseases. 
 
 In such busy and exhausting scenes the days of early autumn jiassed. 
 But, whatever the returning toils of each morning, the Saviour still craved 
 and secured hours of lonely calm, for wo read in St. Luke that, during all 
 these weeks. Ho was wont to withdraw, doubtless by night, into lonely 
 places to pray. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 LIGHT AND DARKNESS. 
 
 THE euro of the leper seems to have resulted in Jesus returning, for 
 a time, to Capernaum. He had acted with the greatest caution 
 during His mission, to avoid giving offence, and thus raising opposition 
 which would have been fatal, at the very opening of His ministry. From 
 many a hill-top on His journeyings. He and His disciples had, doubtless, 
 often looked to the mountains in the south-east, amidst which John lay, a 
 helpless prisoner ; and they must have felt that the prince who had thus 
 cut short the work of the great Reformer might be readily moved to the 
 same violence towards themselves. Jesus had, therefore, shunned noto- 
 riety; and though He never hesitated to accept homage, where it was 
 sincere and spontaneous. He had never demanded it, and had kept even 
 His miraculous powers in strict subordination to the great work of pro- 
 claiming the advent of the kingdom of God. The appeals of pain and 
 misery had, indeed, constrained Him to relieve them, but He had accom-
 
 360 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 pauied His miracles by a strict prohibition of their being made more 
 publicly known than was inevitable. 
 
 In spite of every precaution, however, the report of His wonderful 
 doings spread far and wide, and drew ever increasing attention. Political 
 circles, as yet, did not condescend to notice Him, but He was already 
 watched by the sleepless eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities. It was 
 enough that He acted independently of them. Not to be with them was, 
 in tlieir eyes, to be against them, for they claimed, as the spiritual leaders 
 of the nation, the sole direction of its religious teaching. The more 
 wonderful His works, the greater their excitement, and the keener their 
 jealousy. In any case, therefore, the words which accompanied such ex- 
 traordinary manifestations, would have been watched with the closest 
 scrutiny, for any chance of vindicating their care of the religious interests 
 entrusted to them. In an age of such rigid literalism and unchanging 
 conservatism, no teacher with the least individuality of thought or ex- 
 pression could hope to escape, where the determination to condemn was 
 already fixed. Far less Avas it possible for one like Jesus — so sincei-o 
 amidst general insincerity, so intense and real amidst what was hollow and 
 outward, so pure and elevated amidst what was gross and worldly, so 
 tenderly human amidst what was harsh and exclusive — to avoid giving 
 pretext for censure. The priests and Eabbis through the whole land felt 
 instinctively that their influence was imperilled by His liglitest word. 
 They already were coldly suspicious. The next step would be to blame, 
 and they would seek, before long, to destroy Him ; for it has, in all ages, 
 been the sad characteristic of the leaders of dominant religious parties, to 
 confound the gratification of the worst passions with loyalty to their 
 office. 
 
 Perhaps Jesus had hoped that in Capernaum, at least. He would find an 
 hiterval of repose, for His absence might have been expected to have 
 allayed the excitement. No spot in Palestine seemed less likely to be dis- 
 turbed by the hostility of the schools. In Jerusalem men looked back to 
 a past dating from Melchisedek, and were its slaves ; but Capernaum was 
 so new that its name does not occur at all in the Old Testament. He soon 
 found, however, that the dark and hateful genius of Eabbinism, with its 
 puerile customs and formulas, and its fierce bigotry, was abroad through 
 the whole land. 
 
 It was vain to expect that a " city set on a hill " could be hidden. He 
 had scarcely re-entered the town before it ran from mouth to mouth that 
 He had returned and was at home. Crowds joresently gathered, and filled 
 not only the house, but the space before it. There was to he no rest for 
 the Son of Man till He found it in the garden gi'ave of Joseph of Arimathea. 
 The applause, the gaping wonder, the huge concourse of people, were only 
 a grief to Him. He had broken away from them before, and sought refuge 
 from the temptations they tended to excite, in lonely prayer by night, on 
 the neighbouring hills, under the pure and silent stars. They had 
 followed Him on His journey from town to town, and now, on His return 
 to Capernaum, the clamour of voices, and the pressure of throngs, beset 
 Him more than ever. Had anxiety to hear the truths of the new spiritual
 
 LIGHT AND DAEKNESS. 361 
 
 kingdom caused this excitement it would have been healthy, but it had 
 been already shown only too clearly that, while men believed in His power 
 to heal, they cared little for His higher claims. Eegret for bodily illness, 
 or ready sympathy with the sufferers, simply as under physical trouble, 
 were evidently the only thought, to the exclusion of any sense of graver 
 spiritual disease in all alike. The very maladies often revealed moral 
 impurity as their cause ; and the selfish struggle for His favour, and the 
 too frequent ingratitude of the cured, saddened His soul. Of the multi- 
 tudes whom He had healed, most had disappeared, without any signs of 
 having heeded His appeals and warnings. Even the leper, who had at 
 least promised silence, was hardly out of His presence before he forgot his 
 pledge. He was already the Man of Sorrows, but Divine compassion still 
 urged Him to heal. 
 
 To make the trial greater, it was evident that mischief was brewing. 
 Tlie Rabbis were astir. They had heard of the multitudes attracted from 
 the other side of the Jordan on the east, from as far as Jerusalem and 
 even Idumea on the south, and from Phenicia on the north, and had 
 followed the crowds, and gathered in Capernaum from every town of 
 Galilee and Judea, and from Jerusalem itself, to hear and see the new 
 wonder. Sensitive in their own interest, they came with no friendly 
 motive, but cold aiid hostile, to criticize and, if possible, to condemn. 
 
 Even in Galilee the influence of the order was great. It had done im- 
 mense service to the nation in earlier days, in kindling an intense feeling 
 of nationality, and an enthusiasm, for their faith, at first healthy and 
 beneficial, though now perverted. The Rabbis were the heads of the 
 nation in the widest sense, for the religion of the i^eople was also their 
 politics. They were the theologians, the jurists, the legislators, the 
 politicians, and, indeed, the soul of Israel. The priests had sunk to a 
 subordinate place in the public regard. The veneration which the people 
 felt for their Law was willingly extended to its teachers. They were 
 greeted reverently in the street and in the mai'ket-place, men rising up 
 before them as they passed ; the title of Rabbi was universally accorded 
 them; the front seats of the synagogues were set apart for them, and 
 they took the place of honour at all family rejoicings, that they might 
 discourse incidentally to the company on the Law. Wise in their gener- 
 ation, they fostered this homage by external aids. Their long robes, their 
 broad phylacteries or prayer fillets, on their forehead and arm, and theii' 
 conspicuous Tallithin, with the sacred tassels dangling from each corner, 
 were part of themselves, without which they were never seen. The people 
 gloried in them as the croAvn of Israel, and its distinguishing honour 
 above all other nations. " Learn where is wisdom," says Baruch, "where 
 is strength, where is understanding. It has not been heard of in Canaan, 
 nor seen in Teman. The Hagarenes seek wisdom, and the traders of 
 Meran and Teman, and the poets and philosophers, but they have not 
 found out the way of wisdom, or discovered her path. God has found out 
 the whole way of wisdom, and hath given it to His servant Jacob, and to 
 Israel, His beloved." Jerusalem was, naturally, while the Temple worship 
 continued, the liead-quarters of the wisdom of the Rabbis, but they were
 
 362 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 found in all the synagogue towns both of Judea and Galilee. They formed 
 the members of the local ecclesiastical and criminal courts, over the 
 country, and at Jerusalem virtually controlled the authorities, and thus 
 framed the religious and general lav/ for the nation at large, so far as 
 allowed by the Romans. Their activity never rested. Whether as guests 
 from the Holy City, or as residents, they pervaded the land, visiting every 
 school and synagogue, to extend their influence by teaching and exhorta- 
 tions. A Rabbi, indeed, could move from place to ]:)lace with little trouble, 
 for, in most cases, he lived by trade or handicraft, and could thus unite busi- 
 ness and religion in his missionary journeys. Their ceaseless circuits 
 are painted in the Targum on Deborah's song. It makes the prophetess say 
 — " I am sent to praise the Scribes of Israel, who ceased not, in the evil 
 times, to expound the Law. It was beautiful to see how they sat in the 
 sjaiagogues and taught the people the words of the Law ; how they uttered 
 the blessings and confessed the trnth before God. They neglected their 
 own affairs, and rode on asses round the whole land, and sat for judg- 
 ment." The paraphrase is an anachronism when applied to the age of the 
 Judges, but it vividly illustrates Rabbhiical zeal in the days of Christ. 
 
 Soon after His return to Capernaum, an incident occurred which led to 
 the first open difference between Jesus and this all-powerful order. The 
 crowds had gathered in such numbers at Peter's house, that not only the 
 house itself, but the sjoace before it, was once more full. Among the 
 audience were Scril^c-s from all parts, to see if they should unite with the 
 new movement and turn it to their own purposes, or take measures 
 against it. If we may judge from the ruins on the site of the town, the 
 house was only a single very low storey high, with a flat roof, reached by 
 a stairway from the yard or court, and Jesus may have stood near the 
 door in such a position as to be able to address the crowd outside, as well 
 as those in the chamber. Possibly, however, there were two storeys in 
 this particular house, as there must have been in some in the town, and in 
 that case the upper one would probably be a large room — the " upper" 
 and best chamber — such as was often used elsewhere by the Rabbis, for 
 reading and expounding the Law to their disciples, and Jesus may have 
 stood near the open window, so as to be heard both oiitside and within. 
 
 Prom some favourable spot He was addressing the thickly crowded 
 audience respecting the kingdom of God, so long prophesied, and now at 
 last in their midst, when four men approached bearing a sick person, on a 
 hammock shmg between them. It proved to be a man entirely paralyzed. 
 Unable to make their way through the throng, the bearers went round the 
 house to see what should be done. They had perhaps come from a dis- 
 tance, and were thus too late to get at once near the great Healer. The 
 outside stairs to the roof, however, offered them a solution of their difii- 
 culty. The sick man was bent on getting to the feet of Jesus, and willingly 
 let them take him to the house-top, which they were able to do by fasten- 
 ing cords to the hammock, and pulling it up, after they theiuselves had 
 got lip to it by the narrow and ladder-like steps. 
 
 Their trembling burden once safely on the roof, the rest was easy. 
 Eastern houses are, in many ways, very different from ours, but in none
 
 LIGHT AND DARKNESS. 363 
 
 more strikingly than in the lightness of the roof. Eafters arc laid on 
 the top of tho sicic T\'alls, about tlireo feet apart, and on these short 
 sticks are put, till the whole space is covered. Over tliese, again, a thick 
 coating of brnslnvood, or of some common bush, is spread. A coat of 
 mortar comes next, burying and levelling all beneath it, and on this again, 
 is sjoread marl or earth, which is rolled flat and hard. Many roofs, indeed, 
 are much slighter — earth closely rolled or beaten down, perhaps mixed 
 with ashes, lime, and chopped straw, being all the owners can afford — and 
 thus, even at this day, it is common to see grass growing on the house-top 
 after the rains, and repairs of cracks made by the sun's rays are often 
 needed in the hot season, to prevent heavy leakage. It is thus easy to 
 break up a roof when necessary, and it is often done. The earth is merely 
 sci'aped back from a part, and the thorns and short sticks removed, till an 
 opening of the required size is made. 
 
 Through some such simple roofing the four bearers now opened a space 
 large enough to let down the sick man into the chamber where Jesus 
 stood. Cords tied to the couch made the rest easy, and the paralytic was 
 presently at the feet of Jesus. He lay there, the living dead, but his out. 
 ward troubles were not his greatest. Looking on his calamity as a punish- 
 ment from God for past sins — perhaps feeling that it had been brought 
 upon him by a vicious life — he was even more sorely stricken in spirit than 
 in body. !N"o one, he felt, could help him but He to reach whom had been 
 his deepest wish. To be healed within, was even more with him than to 
 be restored to outward health. He had nothing to say ; perhaps he could 
 not speak, for palsy often hinders articulation. But his eyes told his 
 whole story, and Ho before whom he had tluxs strangely come, read it at a 
 glance. He was still a young man, which in itself awakened sympathj^ ; 
 but he had, besides, in his anxiety to get near, by whatever means, and the 
 humility which sought cleansing from guilt more than restoration to 
 health, shown a recognition of Christ's higher dignity as the dispenser of 
 spiritual blessings. With an endearing word used by teachers to disciples, 
 or by superiors in age or rank, Jesus flashed the light of hope on his 
 troubled spirit. " My child," said He, " thy sins are forgiven thee." 
 
 It was a wondrous utterance, and must have sounded still more 
 strangely, when thus first heard, than to us, who have been familiar with 
 it from childhood. No one had ever heard Him admit, even by a passing 
 word. His own sinfulness; He showed no humility before God as a sinner; 
 never sought pardon at His hands. Yet no Rabbi approached Him in op- 
 position to all that was Vv^rong, for He went even bej^ond the act to the 
 sinful desire. The standard He demanded was no less than the awful 
 perfection of God. But those around heard Him now rise above any mere 
 tacit assumption of this sinless purity by His setting Himself in open 
 contrast to sinners, in the claim not only to announce the forgiveness of 
 sins by God, but, Himself, to dispense it. He pardons the sins of the re- 
 pentant creature before Him, on His own authority, as a King, which it 
 would be contradictory to have done had He Himself been conscious of 
 having sin and guilt of His own. It was clear that He could have ven- 
 tured on no such assumption of the prerogative of God, had He not felt in
 
 364 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Himself an absolute harmony of spiritual nature witli Him, so that Ho 
 only littered what He knew was the Divine will. It was at once a procla- 
 mation of His own siiilessness, and of His kingly dignity as the Messiah, 
 in whose hands had been placed the rule over the new theocracy. 
 
 The Eabbis felt, in a moment, all that such words implied. Their only 
 idea of a religious teacher was that he should never venture a word on his 
 own authority, but slavishly follow other earlier Eabbis. They had all 
 the conservatism of lawyers. One Beth-din could not put aside the de- 
 cision of another, unless it was superior in wisdom and numbers, and how 
 little likely it was that, even in such a case, any decision should be super- 
 seded, may be judged from the fact that for any one to dispute with a 
 Eabbi or murmur against him, or to hesitate in accepting and obeying his 
 every word, was no less a crime than to do the same towards God Himself. 
 Even the people had caught the spirit of changeless conservatism from 
 their teachers, for, when John Hyrcanus, with a kindly view to relieve 
 them from an almost intolerable burden, ventured to prohibit some trifling 
 Eabbinical rules of the Pharisees, his well-meant liberality, instead of 
 gaining him favour, excited hatred against liim as an intruder and inno- 
 vator. The type of a strict Eabbi found its ideal in Schammai, the rival 
 of Hillel, the founder of the school which was most bitter against Jesus. 
 It was not enough that he sought to make even young children fast 
 through the whole Day of Atonement : during the Feast of Tabernacles he 
 had the roof taken from the room in which lay his daughter-in-law and 
 her new-born son, to have a tent raised over them, that the baby might be 
 aljle to keep the feast. 
 
 The lofty words of Jesus at once caught the ears of the lawyers, on the 
 watch. They sounded new, and to be new was to be dangerous. Nothing 
 in Judaism had been left unfixed : every religious act, and indeed, eveiy 
 act whatever, must follow minutely prescribed rules. The Law knew no 
 such form as an official forgiving of sins, or absolution. The leper might 
 be pronounced clean by the priest, and a transgressor might present a sin- 
 offering at the Temple, and transfer his guilt to it, by laying his hands on 
 its head and owning his fault before God, — and the blood sprinkled by the 
 priest on the horns of the altar, and towards the Holy of Holies, was an 
 atonement that " covered " his sins from the eyes of Jehovah, and pledged 
 his forgiveness. But that forgiveness was the direct act of God ; no 
 human lips dared pronounce it. It was a special prerogative of the 
 Almighty, and even should mortal man venture to declare it, he could 
 only do so in the name of Jehovah, and by His immediate authorisation. 
 But Jesus had s])oken in His own name. He had not hinted at being em- 
 powered by God to act for Him. The Scribes were greatly excited ; 
 whispers, ominous head-shakings, dark looks, and pious gesticulations of 
 alarm, showed that they were ill at ease. " He should have sent him to 
 the priest to present his sin-offering, and have it accepted; it is blas- 
 phemy to speak of forgiving sins ; He is intruding on the Divine rights." 
 The blasphemer ^vas to be put to death by stoning, his body hung on a 
 tree, and then buried with shame. " Who can forgive sins but one God ? " 
 
 It was the turning point in tlio life of Jesus ; for the accusation of
 
 LIGHT AND DARKNESS. 365 
 
 blasj)hemy, now muttered in tlic lieails of the llabbis present, was the 
 beginning of tlie process whicli ended, after a time, on Calvary; and He 
 knew it. The genius of Kabbinism was in direct antagonism to that of 
 His "new teaching." Christ required a change of heart, the Eabbis, 
 instruction; He looked at the motive of an act, they at its strict accord- 
 ance to legal forms ; He contented Himself v/ith implanting a principle 
 of pure and loving obedience in the breast, which should make men a law 
 to themselves, tlicy taught that every detail of religions observance, from 
 the cradle to the grave — to the very smallest — should be prescribed, and 
 rigidly followed in every formal particular. He promised the Divine 
 Spirit to aid His followers to a perfect obedience ; the Eabbis enforced 
 obedience by the terrors of the Church courts, which they controlled. 
 Resting thus on wholly different conceptions — the Eabbi, self-satisfied 
 in the observance of external rites and requirements ; Jesus repudiating 
 merit, and basing His kingdom on the willing service of humble and 
 gi'ateful love — the only question was, how long, in an intolerant theocracy, 
 active hostility might be averted. The lowly, wandering Galilasan teacher, 
 who despised long robes and phylacteries, and associated with the rude 
 and ignoratit, from whom the Eabbis shrank as accursed for not knowing 
 the Eabbinical law ; who had no licence as teacher from any Beth-din ; 
 who had attended no Beth-ha-Midrash, or Eabbis' School of the Law, and 
 was thus a mere untrained layman, usurping clerical functions, w'as 
 instinctively suspected and hated, though they could not affect to despise 
 Him. The kingdom of God which He preached was, moreover, something 
 new and irregular. In the words of Baruch, they expected that all who 
 kept the Law in their sense, would, in return, have eternal life as a right, 
 as, indeed, one of their proverbs plainly put it — "He who buys the words 
 of the Law, buys everlasting life." Esteeming themselves blamelessly 
 righteous, they not only despised others, but claimed Heaven, as the 
 special favourites of God. It must, therefore, have been galling in the 
 extreme, to hear Jesus demand humility and repentance and faith in 
 Himself, as the universal conditions of entrance into the new kingdom of 
 God ; to be confounded with the crowd, on whom they looked as Brahmins 
 on Sudras ; and to be stripped of their boasting, and even of their hopes 
 of future political glory, by the proclamation of a new and purely spiritual 
 theocracy, in the place of the national restoration of whicli they dreamed, 
 with themselves at its head. Only a spark was wanting to set their 
 hostility ablaze, and this had now been supplied. 
 
 For the time they were helpless in the presence of so much enthusiasm 
 for Jesus, but this only increased their bitterness, on their finding that 
 He had kept His eyes on them, and knew their thoughts. They were now 
 still more confused by His openly asking them, " Why they were thinking 
 evil in their hearts?" He had long felt that He could not hope to make 
 any healthy impression on a class who affected to regard Him as half 
 beside Himself on religious matters, and as one who had set Himself up 
 as a Rabbi, and excited the jjeople against their teachers. He knew that 
 they put the worst construction on all He said, and were laying up matter 
 for future open attack. But no passing thought of fear disturbed Him.
 
 366 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 He liad come to witness to the trutli, and at once accepted the challenge 
 which their hostile looks and bearing implied. Withont waiting to he 
 assailed, He snddcnly asked them, "Which is easier? To say to this 
 paralytic, Thy sins are forgiven, or to say, Eise, and take up thy bed and 
 go ? " There might be deception about the forgiveness, for no one could 
 tell if the absolution were of any avail, but there could be none respecting 
 the cure of a helpless living corpse. Turning to the bed without waiting 
 an answer. He continued— in irresistible self- vindication— " That ye may 
 know that the Son of Man has authority on the earth to forgive sins,— 
 Eise, poor man, take up the mat on which you have been lying, and go 
 home." It was enough; sensibility and power of motion returned to the 
 helpless limbs; muscles and nerves lost their torpor; strength poured 
 once more through the veins. Slov\dy, scarce realizing what it meant, he 
 rose, little by little, his eyes fixed on his Deliverer, till, at last, he stood 
 erect before Him, to sink at His knees again in grateful adoration. But 
 he could not be allowed to stay. Stepping back, without saying a word, 
 Jesus, by a look, motioned him to retire, and lifting the mat, he did so, 
 his eyes still fixed on his Helper, as he made his way backward througli 
 the awe-stricken crowd. 
 
 The effect was electric. The Scribes were, for the time, discomfited. 
 Amazement and fear mingled with religious awe. "We never saw ifc 
 thus," cried some, while others, with true Easteim demonstrativeness, 
 broke out iuto praise of God who had given such power to men. Mean- 
 while, Jesus glided out of the apartment, sad at heart, for the shadow of 
 the cross had fallen on His soul. 
 
 A number of disciples must, by this time, have been gained in different 
 parts, but the inner circle gathered by Jesus as His personal followers, 
 was as yet limited to the few whom He had first " called." Another was, 
 now, however, to be added to their number. Capernaum, as a busy trading 
 town, on the marches between the dominions of Philip and tliose of 
 Antipas, and, fi'om its being on the high road between Damascus and 
 Ptolemais, had a strong staff of custom-house officers, or publicans, to use 
 the common name. The traflic landed at Capernaum from across the lake, 
 or shi^iped from it, had to pay dues, and so had all that entered or left the 
 town in other directions. There were tolls on the highways and on the 
 bridges, and at each place the humbler grades of publicans were required, 
 wliile a few of a higher rank had charge of the aggregate receipts of the 
 minor offices of the district. These officials were often freedmen, or even 
 slaves of the larger farmers of the local imposts ; sometimes natives of the 
 part, and even poor Eoman citizens. The whole class, however, had a bad 
 name for greed and exaction. So loud, indeed, and serious, did the remon- 
 strances of the whole Eoman world become, at the tyranny and plunder- 
 ings thus suffered, that, a generation later, ISTero proposed to the Senate 
 to do away with taxes altogether, though the idea resulted only in an 
 official admission that the "greed of the publicans must be repressed, lest 
 they should at hist, by new vexations, render the ^aublic burdens intoler- 
 able." Tlic underlings, especially, sought to enrich themselves by grinding 
 the people ; and the checks they caused to commerce, the trouble they
 
 LIGHT AND DARKNESS. 367 
 
 gave by reckless cxainiuatiou of goods and by tedious delays, by false 
 cutries and illegal duties, made tlicm intc;isely hated. " Bears and lions," 
 said a proverb, " niiglit be the fiercest wild beasts iu the forests, but 
 i:)ublicans and informers were the worst iu the cities." The Jews, who 
 bore the Roman yoke with more impatience than any other nation, and 
 shunned all contact with foreigners, excommunicated every Israelite who 
 became a joublican, and declared him incompetent to bear witness in their 
 courts, and the disgrace extended to his whole family. Nobody was 
 allowed to take alms from one, or to ask him to change money for them. 
 They were even classed with highway robbers and murderers, or with 
 harlots, heathen, a:id sinners. No strict Jew would eat, or even hold 
 intercourse with them. 
 
 With a supreme indifference to the prejudices of the day, Jesus resolved 
 to receive one of this proscribed order into the chosen group of His fol- 
 lowoi's. With a wide and generous charity, He refused to condemn a 
 whole class. That they were outcasts from society was a special reason 
 why He, the Son of Man, should seek to win them to a better life. He 
 refused to admit anything wrong in paying tribute to Cassar, and hence 
 saw no sin in its collection. There was no necessity for a publican not 
 being just and faithful, alike to the people and to the State, and He had 
 seen for Himself that there were some aoiainst whom nothin^r could be 
 justly urged. It Avas, moreover, a fundamental principle with Him, that 
 the worst of men, if they sincerely repented, and turned to God, should be 
 gladly received, as prodigal sons who sought to regain the favour of their 
 Father in heaven. He had come to seek and to save that which was lost, 
 and He sought to proclaim to ma^nkiud that He despaired of none, by 
 recognising, in the most hopeless, the possibility of good. Looking abroad 
 on the world with a Divine love and compassion that knew no distinction 
 of race or calling, He designed to show, at its very birth, that the Kingdom 
 He came to establish was open to all humanity, and that the only con- 
 dition of citizenship was spiritual fitness. 
 
 Among the staff of publicans employed in collecting duties at Cajjer- 
 naum, vras one whom his name, Lev i, marked as belonging to the old 
 ]n'iestly tribe, though, perhaps, born in Galilee, and now sunk to so ques- 
 tionable a position. He had another name, Matthe w, however, by which 
 he is better known as one of the Apostles, and the author of the first 
 Gospel. His business was to examine the goods passing either way on 
 the great high road between the territories of the two neighbouring 
 tetrarchs, to enter them on the official record, to receive the duties and 
 credit them in his books, in order, finally, to pay over the gross proceed? 
 at given times, to the local tax-farmer. He seems to have been in com 
 fortable circumstances, and it is, perhaps, due to his clerkly habits as a 
 publican, that we owe to him the earliest of the Gospels. He was the son 
 of one Alphcus, the name of the father of James the Less. They may, 
 however, have been different persons, as the name was a very common 
 one ; and we know that there were two Judes, two Simons, and two called 
 James, in the little band round Jesus. 
 
 Doubtless Levi, or Matthew, had shovv^n an interest in the mgw Teacher, 
 
 /
 
 368 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 and had been among tlic crowds that thronged Him. The quick eye of 
 Jesus had read his heart, and seen his sincerity. Though a pubhcan, he 
 was a Jew, and showed repentance and hopeful trust, which made hira a 
 true son of Abraham. Tlie booth in which, in Oriental fashion, he sat at 
 his duties, was at the harbour of the town, on the Avay to the shore where 
 Jesus was in the habit of addressing the throngs who now always followed 
 Him, and it needed only a look and a word of the Master, to make him 
 throw up his office, an.d cast in his lot with Him. At the command of 
 Jesus he "left all, rose up, and folloAved Him;" not, of coui-se, on the 
 moment, for he would have to take formal steps to release himself, and 
 would require to settle his accounts with his superior, before he was free. 
 Henceforth, however, he attended Him who soon had not where to lay His 
 head. It was a critical time for Jesus, and His admission of a publican as 
 a disciple coiild not fail to irritate His enemies still more. But He had no 
 hesitation in His course. Sent to the lost. He gladly welcomed, to His 
 closest intimacy, one of their number in whom He saw the germs of true 
 spiritual life, in calm disregard of the prejudices of the time, and the false 
 religious narrowness of His fellow countrymen, and their ecclesiastical 
 leaders. He desired, in the choice of a publican as apostle, to embody 
 visibly His love for sinners, and show the quickening virtue of the king- 
 dom of God, even in the most unlikely. 
 
 An act so entirely new and revolutionary, in the best sense, was too 
 momentous in the eyes of Matthew to pass unnoticed. It was the ojoening 
 of a new day for the multitudes whom the narrow self -righteousness of 
 the Rabbis had branded as under the curse of God, and had condemned as 
 hopeless before Hira. The new " call " of Jesus was in vivid contrast to 
 that of Abraham and Moses, for Abraham had been separated even from 
 his triljc, and Moses summoned only the Jews to found the theocracy he 
 proposed to establish. The " call " which Matthew had obeyed was as 
 infinitely comprehensive as the earlier ones had been rigidly exclusive. It 
 showed that all would be admitted to the Society Jesus was setting up, 
 whatever their social position ; if they had spiritual fitness for membership. 
 Caste was utterly disallowed ; before the great Teacher, all men, as such, 
 were recognised as equally sons of the Heavenly Father. Accustomed 
 from infancy to take this for granted, we cannot realize the magnitude of 
 the gift this new principle inaugurated, or its astounding novelty. A 
 Brahmin, who should proclaim it in India, and illustrate the social enfran- 
 chisement he taught, by raising a despised Pariah to his intimate inter- 
 course and friendship, would be the only counterjDart we can imagine at 
 this day. 
 
 It Avas natural, therefore, that Matthew should celebrate an event so 
 unique as his call, by a " gTcat feast in his house," in honour of Jesus ; and 
 no less so that ho should invite a large number of his class, to rejoice with 
 him at the new era ojicned to them, or that he should extend the invita- 
 tion to his friends of the proscribed classes generally. A number of 
 persons in bad odour with their moi'e correct fellow-citizens were, hence, 
 brought together by him, along with the publicans of the locality, to do 
 Jesus honour ; persons branded by public opinion as " sinners," a name
 
 LIGHT AND DAHKNESS. 3(59 
 
 given indiscriminately to usurers, gamblers, thieves, publicans, slieplierds, 
 and sellers of fruit grown in the sabbath years. It might have seemed 
 doubtful whether Jesus would sit down with such a company, for, even 
 with us, it would be a bold step for any public teacher to join a gathering 
 of persons in bad repute. The admission of Matthew to the discipleship 
 must have seemed to many a great mistake. Nothing could more certainly 
 damage the prospects of Jesus with the influential classes, or create a 
 wider or deeper prejudice and distrust. But nothing weighed for a 
 moment with Him against truth and right. His soul was filled with a 
 grand enthusiasm for humanity, and no false or narrow exclusiveness of 
 the day could be allowed to stand in its way. He accepted the invitation 
 with tlic readiest cheerfulness, and spent the evening in the pleasures of 
 friendly social intercourse with the strange assembly. 
 
 The Eabbis had hardly as yet made up their minds how to act respect- 
 ing Him. They had attended John's preaching, though they did not 
 submit to His baptism, which would have been to admit his sweeping 
 charges against their order, as a brood of serpents. But Jesus had not as 
 yet attacked them. He would fain have won them, as well as the people, 
 to the kingdom of God. He had preached this kingdom, and the need 
 of righteousness ; had honoured Moses and the prophets ; had pressed, as 
 His great precepts, the love of God and our neighbour ; and in all these 
 matters the Pharisees could support Him. He had enforced moderation 
 on His disciples, and had sought intercourse with the Eabbis, ratiier than 
 shunned it. His reply to their earlier opposition was gentle though 
 unanswerable. No doubt He knew from the first that they would reject 
 Plis overtures, but it was none the less right to seek to woo them to 
 friendship, that they might enter His kingdom if they would. Had they 
 joined Him, their influence would have aided His work ; if they refused, 
 He had done His part. He did, indeed, win some. Here and there a 
 Eabbi humbled himself to follow Him, though He did not belong to the 
 schools, and was the deadly opponent of their cherished traditions. Others 
 hesitated; but some even of the leading Pharisees, as at Capernaum^ 
 invited Him to their houses and tables, listened to His teaching, reasoned 
 modestly with Him, and treated Him, every way, with respect. He was 
 looked upon by them as a friend of the nation, and the title of Kabbi was 
 willingly given Him, 
 
 But it became clearer, each day, that there could be no alliance between 
 views so opposed as His and theii-s. Where action was needed He would 
 not for a moment conceal His difference from them, and Matthew's feast 
 was an occasion on which a great principle demanded decisive expi^ession. 
 
 To the Eabbis, and the Pharisees at large, nothing could be more unbe- 
 coming and irregular than the presence of Jesus at such a gathering. To 
 be Levitically " clean," was the supreme necessity of their religious lives. 
 They regarded themselves as true friends of their race, and they were, in 
 fact, the leaders of the nation. But they looked at men not simply as 
 such, but through the cold superficial medium of an artificial theology, 
 which dried up their sympathy. Their philanthropy was narrowed to the 
 limits of Levitical purity. Publicans and sinners, and the mass of tho 
 
 B B
 
 370 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 lower classes, were, to a Pharisee, hopelessly lost, because of their " un- 
 cleanness," and he shrank from all contact with them. He might wish to 
 save, but he dared not touch, or come near them, and so left them to their 
 misery and sin. No Pharisee would receive a person as a guest if he 
 suspected that he was a " sinner." He would not let one of the " Am-ha- 
 aretzin"— the common people— touch him. It was unlawful to come into 
 their company, even with the holy design of inducing them to read the 
 Law, and it was defilement to take food from them, or, indeed, from any 
 stranger, or even to touch a knife belonging to them. The thousands 
 " unclean " from mere ignorance, or from their callings, or from careless- 
 ness, were an "abomination," "vermin," "unclean beasts," and "twice 
 accursed." And to touch the clothes of one of the " common people," 
 defiled every Pharisee alike, while the touch of those of a Pharisee of a 
 lower grade of Levitical purity defiled one of a higher. Like the Essenes, 
 one Pharisee avoided the contact of another less strict, and, therefore, of a 
 lower rank of holiness. 
 
 It must, therefore, have been as if a Brahmin had outraged every idea 
 of Hindoo religion and morals, by sitting down at a meal with Sudras, 
 when the Ptal^bis at Capernaum saw and heard of Jesus reclining at table 
 among a promiscuous gathering of publicans and sinners. 
 
 They had not yet, however, come to open controversy with Him, and 
 contented themselves with contemptuous taunts about Him to the dis- 
 ciples, who, as Jews, must have at least formerly shared the sovereign 
 contempt felt for such hated social outcasts. Even to hold a religious 
 service with them would have been a breach of the Law, but to join them 
 on a footing of friendly intercourse ! " Founder of a new holy kingdom of 
 God, and recline at table with publicans and sinners ! " How keenly such 
 words must have wounded men like Peter, and the small knot of disciples 
 who followed Jesus, may be imagined. They had been taught in the 
 school of the Baptist, an earnest Jew, who had enforced ultra-Pharisaic 
 Judaism. The early scruples of Peter survived even to apostolic times. 
 Jaiues was a ISTazarite till his death, if we can trust tradition, and even 
 Matthew, the priestly publican, for his name Levi shows him to have been 
 of priestly race, is said to have eaten, through life, only fruit, vegetables, 
 and bread, but no flesh. In their perplexity and distress they appealed to 
 Jesus. 
 
 It was well they did so, for their distress procured for all ages an answer 
 of Divine sweetness and grandeur. " To whom sliotild I go but to such as 
 these ? The whole have no need of a phj^sician, but they that are sick. 
 Tm^n to the prophets whom you revere, and think what the words of Hosea 
 mean, ' I desire mercy, and not sacrifice ' — acts rather than offerings — • 
 practical godliness, not legal forms — Divine sympathy with the lost, rather 
 than only the empty show of outward worshija —for I have not come to call 
 the righteous, but to call sinners to repentance. I expect nothing from 
 men who think they are righteous, and despise others. They feel no need 
 of Me. My help is needed for just such ' sinners ' as they would have me 
 leave to perish." 
 
 Jesus had not, of course, the bodily sick in His thoughts. He spoke of
 
 LIGHT AND DARKNESS. 371 
 
 the mass of the people of the middle and lower ranks, too sadly marked by 
 religious shortcomings and unworthiness. The guests at Matthew's table 
 were, doubtless, more or less open to accusations of covetousness, im- 
 purity, indifference to morality and religion, and doubtful worth as 
 citizens. John would have kept himself aloof from them, unless they 
 came, as penitents, for baptism. He had lived in wildernesses, apart from 
 men, shrinking from the turmoil of the great world. He had even for- 
 bidden lawful enjoyments and pleasures. He had sought to build up the 
 Kingdom of Heaven on the lonely banks of the Jordan, far from men, by 
 sternly commanding the broken hearts that sought j^eace and consolation 
 from him, to live lives of Jewish austerity and repentance. Jesus required 
 a change of heart no less than he, but He did not lead men out of the 
 world to secure it, or burden life with the anxiety and disquiet of efforts 
 after outward purity. 
 
 He came trustfully to them into their little world, bringing with Him a 
 heart full of Divine benevolence and tender gentleness. In His eyes they 
 were " sick," and He treated them like a true physician, entering into all 
 their interests, s}Tnpathizing with their cares and sorrows, realizing their 
 special wants, and bearing Himself as a friend among friends. They were 
 men, and, as such, capable of sorrow for sin, and efforts towards a nobler 
 life. They had hearts to recognise goodness, and might thus be won to 
 faith in Himself, as the ideal of the highest spiritual life. Nothing can 
 mark the grandeur of His enthusiasm for humanity, more than that He 
 thus proposed to lay the foundation of His kingdom in a class on which 
 the priests and theologians, and the higher ranks of the day, looked clown 
 with haughty contempt and moral aversion. It shows how dee2:)ly He 
 looked into things, that He recognised the greater openness for the Truth 
 of castes thus discredited; their more frank and decisive bearing towards 
 the startling innovations of His teaching ; their deeper longing for peace 
 of conscience and reconciliation to God. It was the sense of this that had 
 led to the choice of His first disciples from the ranks of the people ; and it 
 was this, in part, that led to that of Matthew. In his case, however, there 
 was, also, the proclamation of His indifference to outward distinctions, or 
 rules, afterwards formulated by Peter — who had never forgotten the lesson 
 — into the memoi'able words, " Of a truth I perceive that God is no re- 
 specter of persons, but, in every nation, he that feareth Him, and worketh 
 righteousness, is accepted of Him." A truth evident enough to-day, but 
 carrying with it, when inaugurated by Jesus, an entire revolution in the 
 religious history of mankind. 
 
 The Divine charity that ran so counter to the narrow pride of the Rabbis 
 was no less startling to the disciples of John, but there were other difficul- 
 ties to both. No open breach had yet taken place, and a friendly confer- 
 ence might explain much. Jesus had silently left the harsh discijjline of 
 fasting behind, and had prescribed no formal rules for prayer, such as 
 were common to the Eabbis and their disciples, and to those of the 
 Baptist ; and now a deputation came to ask Him for an explanation. The 
 Law of Moses had appointed only one fast in the year, on the Day of 
 Atonement, but the Eabbis had added many, both pu.blic and private.
 
 372 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 They enjoined one for the Destruction of Jerusalem by tlie Chaldeans, and 
 others for various incidents connected with the siege, or the troubles of 
 the first period after the Captivity. There was another to lament the day 
 on which the translation of the Scriptures into Greek had been finislied, 
 and every public calamity or emergency was signalized by a fast specially 
 enjoined by the authorities. It was rather to private fasts, however, that 
 allusion was made. Strict Pharisees, aiming at the highest degree of 
 merit, fasted voluntarily every Monday and Thursday, to commemorate, 
 respectively, the going up of Moses to the Mount on the fifth day, to 
 receive the renewed tables of the Commandments, and his descent on the 
 second. They often added other fasts, to have lucky dreams, and to obtain 
 their interpretation; for, like the Essenes, the Pharisees looked on fasts 
 as a preparation for receiving revelations. They fasted also to ai. ert evil, 
 or to procure some good. Mortification and self-infliction had become a 
 formal religious merit, in the mercenary theology of the day, and waa 
 paraded before the world by some, to heighten their reputation for holi- 
 ness. The idea had, at first, risen from a fancied opposition between the 
 body and the soul ; as if the latter could only be duly raised by depressing 
 the former. But asceticism was contraiy to the genius of the new king- 
 dom of God, which laid no stress on meat, or drink, or abstinence from 
 them, but on "righteousness, peace, and joy, in the Holy Ghost." 
 
 Even prayer had been reduced to a mechanical system, as part of " the 
 hedge of the Law," invented by the Eabbis. No one could lay greater 
 stress on it than Jesus, when offered as the utterance of contrite humility; 
 but, as a part of a system of merit like the Rabbinical theology of the day, 
 He held it lightly. No precepts could be more worthy than many found, 
 even yet, in the Rabbis, respecting the true worth of prayer; but, in 
 practice, these higher teachings had fallen into wide disuse. It had come 
 to be tedious for length, and abounded in repetitions. Minute rules for 
 correct prayer were taught, with fixed hours, and prescribed forms, and 
 superstitious power was assigned to the mere words. The householder 
 was to repeat the Sch'ma in his house morning and evening, to drive away 
 evil spirits. To say it when in bed was like grasping a two-edged sword, 
 to slay the assaulting demons. The mere form of prayer, if recited rightly 
 and often, was counted as merit laid up in heaven. To say the Sch'ma 
 often was, in fact, in the phrase of the Rabbis, " to make the kingdom of 
 heaven one's own." 
 
 It could not be doubtful how Jesus would bear Himself to views so 
 opposed to inner and spiritual religion. Silently omitting any reference 
 to the objection respecting prayer. He addressed Himself to the question 
 of fasting. "His presence with His disciples was like that of a bride- 
 groom with his companions, during the marriage rejoicings. Could He 
 ask them to fast while He was witli them ? It would be time for them to 
 do so when He was taken away from them. They would fast then!" 
 Seizing the opportunity, and addressing the disciples of John especially, 
 He went even further. " John had sought to do what was worse than 
 hopeless— to renew the old theocracy by merely external reform ; to patch 
 up the old and torn robe of Judaism, and make it serve a new age. It was
 
 LIGHT AND DARKNESS. 373 
 
 as vain as a man's sewing a piece of raw unteazled cloth on tlie rent of 
 an old garment ; tlie patch conld only tear off so much more and make the 
 rent worse, while the patch itself would be a mere shred. Or, it was 
 like putting new wine into old skins, which must burst when the wine 
 fermented. New teaching, like His, must be put into new bottles ; the 
 forms and rites that had served till now were of no more use ; a new dis- 
 pensation had come, which those forms would only cumljer. New forms 
 were needed for the new religious life He came to introduce." 
 
 "Words so fatal to cherished prejudices must have struck deep, but the 
 hearts He had unavoidably wounded were not left without tender soothing. 
 " It was no wonder that John had clung to the faith of his fathers, even in 
 its outward accidents. He had drunk of the old wine, and would not 
 change it for new ! contented to know that ' the old was good.' " Hence- 
 forth, however, the position of Jesus to the worn-out forms of the past 
 was unmistakable. He had chosen His path, and would lead mankind 
 from the bondage of the letter to the freedom of the spirit, and the wor- 
 shippers of the letter arrayed themselves against Him. As became the 
 Founder of the first purely spiritual religion the world had seen, He 
 henceforth silently ignored the ceremonial law, avoiding open condemna- 
 tion, but bearing Himself towards it throughout as He did in the matter 
 of circumcision, which He never enforced on His disciples, or demanded 
 from believing heathen, and never commended, though He never, in words, 
 condemned it. The whole ritual system, of which it was the most pro- 
 minent feature, was treated as merely indifferent. 
 
 It^vas indescribably touching to see, at the very threshold of our Lord's 
 public life, that even when He uses so joyous an image of Himself as that 
 of a bridegroom, He dashes in the picture with shadow. He had begun 
 His course by the Temptation ; but, thenceforward, to the close His path 
 lay through struggle, suffering, and self-sacrifice, to a far other glory than 
 that which was expected in the Messiah. He would, indeed, have known 
 His nation and their Eoman masters — the dominant Pharisees, and the 
 priesthood — badly, not to have foreseen, from the first, that He would 
 have to pass through the fiercest conflict, only to reach a tragic end. 
 Thoughts of self-denial, self-sacrifice, even to the surrender of life ; of 
 losing life that He might gain it ; of the corn dying that it might bring 
 forth fruit, run like a dark thread through all His discourses, to the very 
 end. He sends His Apostles forth like sheep amongst wolves ; foretells 
 their suffering the bitterest persecution ; and consoles them only with the 
 one thought that it should content the disciple to be on the same footing 
 with Himself. In the Sermon on the Mount, He predicts that all who 
 believe on Him will suffer hatred and evil treatment. He recognises those 
 alone as His true followers who, denying themselves, take up His cross 
 and bear it. He has nothing to promise His disciples but that they should 
 be servants, submitting patiently to the extremest wrong, and has no 
 higher vision even for Himself. He may rejoice, as the bridegroom, with 
 His friends, for a time, but will soon be taken away from them. A king- 
 dom founded on such a basis of deliberate self-denial and self-sacrifice, ia 
 unique in the history of the world.
 
 374 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV. 
 
 THE CHOICE OF THE TWELVE, AND THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 
 
 HOW long Jesiis remained at Capernaum is not told us, but we may 
 readily believe tbat He was glad to leave it, witli its gathering 
 opposition, as soon as possible. Though it was His centre of action, the 
 Kin"-dom needed to be proclaimed over the whole land. Preachiiig was 
 the special agency on which He relied, far more than on any displays of 
 supernatui-al power. It was by it He designed to work the stupendous 
 spiritual miracle of the new birth of Israel and of Humanity. As the 
 Founder of a religion which had no code of laws and repudiated force, 
 addressing itself solely to the free convictions of men, — the living word and 
 its illustration in His own life, were alone open to Him as means for its 
 diffusion. The hearts and souls of men must be won to the highest truth, 
 by persuading the conscience, and thus influencing the will. In these 
 earlier months He took advantage of the facilities of the synagogue 
 service, to gain the ear of the people, but His preaching was very different 
 from the stereotyped lifelessness of the Rabbis, and excited universal 
 astonishment by its originality, power, and resistless enthusiasm. At a 
 later time, when His " new doctrine " had roused the opposition of the 
 authorities, the use of the synagogues was no longer granted Him. But, 
 even from the first. He did not confine Himself to fixed times or places. 
 He addressed the people on the shores of the lake, on the lonely slopes and 
 valleys of the hills, in the streets and market-places of towns and villages, 
 at the crossing points of the public roads, and even in houses ; any place, 
 indeed, that offered an audience, was alike to Him. The burden and 
 spirit of His preaching may be gathered from the Gospels throughout. 
 He proclaimed Himself the Good Shepherd seeking to bring back the lost 
 sheep to the heavenly fold ; to quicken and turn towards God the weak, 
 sinful, human will, and to breathe into the soul asj^irations after a higher 
 spiritual life, from the fulness of His own perfect example. 
 
 To Avin all. He moved as a man among men, a friend among friends, a 
 helper amongst all who needed help ; declining every outward honour or 
 flattery, or even the appearance of either. While advancing the most 
 amazing pretensions as His kingly prerogative, He was, personally, so 
 meek and lowly that He could make this gentle humility a ground for the 
 trust and unembarrassed approach of all who were troubled. Content 
 with obscurity, and leaving to others the struggle for distinction or place. 
 He chose a life so humble that the poorest had no awe of His dignity, but 
 gathered round Him as their special friend. His tastes were in keeping 
 with this simplicity, for He delighted in the society of the lowly, and 
 children clustered in His steps with the natural instinct that detects one 
 who loves them. He was never engrossed by His own affairs, but ever 
 ready to give Himself up to those of others- to counsel them in difficulties, 
 to sympathize with them in their sorrows or joys, and to relieve their 
 sickness or wants. It is His grand peculiarity, that there is a total obli- 
 vion of self in His whole life. The enthusiasm of a Divine love, in the pure
 
 THE CHOICE OF THE TWELVE, 375 
 
 light of which no selfish thought could live, filled His whole soul. He 
 showed abiding sympathy for human weakness, and to cheer the outcast 
 and hopeless, He announced that He came to seek such as to others seemed 
 lost. In His joy over a sinner won back to righteousness He hears even 
 the angels of God rejoicing. 
 
 There had never appeared in any age such a man, such a friend, or such 
 a helper. He seemed the contrast of a king or prince, and yet all His 
 words wore kingly, all His acts a succession of the kingliest deeds, 
 decisions, and commands, and His whole public life, the silent and yet 
 truest foundation of an evei'lasting kingdom. He must, indeed, have 
 seemed anything rather than the founder of a nev/ society, or of a new 
 empire, and it miist have startled men when they found that He had, by 
 His works and life, established in the midst of the old theocracy the 
 framework of the most impei'ishable and the widest-reaching empire this 
 earth has ever seen ; an empire before which all former religious systems 
 were to fade away. But though His absolute self-control was never inter- 
 mitted, there were times when the claims of the truth, or the service of 
 His kingdom, brought out the full grandeur of His power and kingly 
 greatness. It was thus when He had to meet and confute prejudice and 
 error, or to heal the sick and diseased. At times we shall see Him forced 
 to blame and condemn, but this was only a passing shadow on the clear 
 heaven of His unvarying grace and love. It is impossible to realize such 
 an appearance, but we can imagine it in some measure. The stainless 
 truth and uprightness which filled His whole nature ; the exhaustless love 
 and pity which were the very breath of His spirit; the radiant joy of the 
 bridegroom wedding redeemed humanity ; the calm light as of other 
 worlds in His every look, may well account for the deathless love and 
 devotion He inspired in those whom He suffered to follow Him. 
 
 The widening success of His work had already required an addition to 
 the small circle of His immediate attendants. But a single accession, like 
 that of Matthew, was, erelong, not enough. It soon became necessary to 
 select a larger number who should be constantly in His company, and 
 receive His mstructions, that they might, in due time, go forth to proclaim 
 the Kingdom over a wider area than He could Himself reach. Its laws, 
 its morality, its relations to the Old Dispensation, must be taught them, 
 and they must catch His enthusiasm by such a lengthened intercourse in 
 the familiarity of private life, as would kindle in their souls the ideal He 
 presented. That they should follow Him at all would be left to them- 
 selves, but the choice would be made by Himself, of such as, on various 
 gi'ounds. He saw fittest. They were to be apostles, or missionaries, and 
 would have, for their high commission, the organization of the new king- 
 dom of God, first in Israel, and then through the world. 
 
 To accept such an invitation implied no little enthusiasm. ISTo earthly 
 reward was held out, but, on the contrary, the sacrifice of all jicrsonal 
 claims was demanded. They were to abandon their former calling, what- 
 ever it might be, with all its present or prospective advantages, to give up 
 all family ties, to bear the worst indignities and ill-treatmcnfc, and yet 
 repress even just resentment. They were to hold their lives at His service.
 
 376 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 and willingly yield them, if it required the sacrifice. A measure of self- 
 restriction is implied as the basis of any state, for no society could flourish 
 where its interests, as a whole, are not spontaneously considered before 
 those of the individual citizen. But the self-abnegation required by Jesus 
 1 in those admitted to the Kingdom He was now founding, was Avithout a 
 j parallel, for while earthly states return an equivalent, in many ways, for 
 the self-surrender they impose, He proclaimed from the first that those 
 who became His followers must do so " hoping for nothing again " to com- 
 pensate for any self-sacrifice, even the greatest. In the case of the 
 "Apostles," the self-surrender was not merely contingent, but present 
 and final, for He held before them no prospect through life but privation 
 and persecution, and even possible martyrdom. In the next world, indeed, 
 He promised rewards, but He precluded mere mercenary hojoes even of 
 these, by making them conditional on unfeigned sincerity in tlie obedience 
 to His laws and love of His person. The mere hypocrite — or actor — could 
 have no object in joining Him, and was indignantly denounced. The 
 truest honesty in word and deed were alone accepted, and the want of it, 
 in any degree, was the one fatal moral defect. 
 
 It is not surprising, therefore, that all who offered themselves as His 
 I followers were not accepted. Where He saw unfitness. He repelled ad- 
 I j vances. To a Eabbi who came saluting Him as " Teacher," and professing 
 ' his willingness to follow Him as His disciple, He returned the discourag- 
 
 ing answer, that the foxes had holes, and the birds of the air nests, but 
 the Son of Man — the Messiah — had not where to lay His head. It might 
 have seemed of moment to secure the support of a Rabbi, but Jesus had 
 seen the worldly bent of his thoughts, and thus turned him aside, by 
 blasting any hopes of advantage or honour in joining Him. Even in- 
 decision or hesitation, whatever tlie ground, was fatal to admittance to 
 
 2_ , His favour. The request of a disciple to go first and bury his father, 
 before finally following Him, was only met by the command to follow Him 
 at once, and leave the spiritually dead to bury the corporeally dead : to 
 put off decision, even for so worthy a cause as desire to perform the last 
 offices to a father, was dangerous ! " Go, thou, and preach the kingdom 
 of God." The devotion due to it, unreservedly, could not be shared, even 
 by the claims of affection and earthly duties. A request to be allowed 
 
 ^ ^ to bid his household farewell, before finally leaving them, was met by a 
 similar answer — "No man having put his hand to the plough, and looking 
 back, is fit for the kingdom of God." The indispensable condition of ad- 
 mittance into the select band who followed and lived with Him, was an 
 engrossing enthusiasm for Himself and His work, which permitted con- 
 cern for no second interest whatever. 
 
 He had determined to surround Himself with a small body of such 
 trustworthy followers, limiting the number, by an association natural to 
 His race, to twelve. They were to form the closest, inmost circle of His 
 disciples, and to be, in fact. His friends and companions. He would give 
 them His fullest confidence : open His mind to them more fully than to 
 others : and, by living among them, inspire them with His own fervour, 
 and mould them to His own likeness. They woixld see how His soul never
 
 THE CHOICE OF THE TWELVE. 377 
 
 unbent fi-oni ibs grand enthusiasm : how Ho never wearied in His tran- 
 scendent devotion of body and spirit to His work. In seeing and hearing 
 Him, they would gain experience : in the opposition and trials they met 
 in His company, their fidelity would be put to the test, and, in the end, 
 they would be qualified for the special work for which they had been 
 chosen — to be sent forth to preach, and to repeat the miraculous works 
 of their Master, as evidence of His Divine authority. 
 
 It is not stated definitely where the selection of the Apostles was made. 
 His preaching had already gained a " great multitude " of disciples, who 
 followed Him in His journey from town to town, along with a vast crowd 
 drawn after Him by various motives. The movement was rapidly assum- 
 ing an importance like that of John; it Avas extending over the nation. 
 "Withdrawing Himself from the throng, by night, as was His frequent 
 custom. He retired once more into the hills to pray, and continued in de- 
 votion till morning. Brought up among hills, He was ever fond of their 
 solitude, their pure air and open sky, which seemed to bring Him nearer 
 His Father. It was somewhere, apparently, in the hilly background of 
 the Sea of Galilee, for though spoken of as "the mountain," there are no 
 means of deciding the precise locality. When the day broke, instead of 
 seeking rest, He revealed the subject of His night-long communion with 
 His Heavenly Father, by proceeding to select His future Apostles. The 
 crowd of His discij^les had returned, with the new day, from the neigh- 
 bouring towns and villages where they had spent the night, when Jesus, 
 coming down from His solitary devotions, gathered them once more round 
 Him, and " calling to Him whom He Himself would," " appointed twelve, 
 that they might be Avith Him, and that He should send them forth to 
 preach — to heal sicknesses, and to cast out devils." 
 
 His choice was necessarily made from a comparatively small number, 
 for the majority must have lately joined Him, and must thus have been, 
 as yet, little known. So far as possible He made His selection from those 
 who had been longest with Him, and whom He had, in some measure, 
 proved ; but they Avere as a whole, simple, unlearned, plastic men of the 
 people ; for Jesus had already seen that the spiritual regeneration of Israel 
 must rise from the humbler classes. He kncAV that the educated men of 
 the nation, the Eabbis and priests, were perverted and prej udiced, and He 
 could not look to the officials or authorities of any grade, or to the prevail- 
 ing religious schools. The commonalty were sounder, freer from the 
 errors of the age, — more open to the eternal truths He came to announce, 
 and more ready to accept the spiritual kingdom He came to found. Yet, 
 it may be, that had the choice been wider, some one might have been 
 available from the trained intellects of the nation, Avith results it would be 
 vain to conjecture. Had Paul been one of the twelve now chosen by 
 Christ, how much might have been changed in the record of the Gospels 
 by the genius, the Eabbinical training, the breadth of mind, and the grand 
 loving enthusiasm Avliich almost founded Western Christianity? Christ 
 laid no stress on their former social position or religious party, for they 
 included, on the one side, a publican, Avho Avas also a Levite, and on the 
 other, one aa'Iio had belonged to the ultra-puritan zealots, the fanatical
 
 378 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 party of Judas the Galilccan. ISTor did He require tlicm to bo immari-icd, 
 for Peter, we kuow, had a wife, and if we may trust the tradition of the 
 Armenian Church, the only Apostles who were single were the sons of 
 I Zebedee, and Thomas. The Capernaum circle yielded Him no fewer than 
 1 seven of the twelve, — Peter, and his brother Andrew, who lived with him ; 
 two sons from the house of Zebedee, — James and John ; two sous of 
 AlphjEus, — James the Little and Jude, who is commonly distinguished as 
 Lebbasus, "the stout-hearted," or Thaddasus, "the brave." The publican 
 Matthew was also from Capernaum, and was the third from the household 
 of Alphasus, if the name refer to the father of James the Little and Jude ; 
 and Philip belonged to the village of Bethsaida in its immediate neigh- 
 bourhood, making in all, eight of the twelve, virtually from the same 
 favoured place. Of the remaining four, Nathanael, the son of Talmai, 
 the Bartholomew of our version, was from Cana, on the north side of the 
 plain of El Battauf, on which Jesus had so often looked down from the 
 Nazareth hill-top. Thomas — ready to die, but slow to believe : manly and 
 full of grave tenderness, — whose Hebrew name was sometimes tui'ued 
 into the Greek equivalent Didymus, " the twin," — was the same person, 
 one tradition says, as Judas, the brother of Jesus ; as if Mary had had a 
 double birth, after bearing her eldest son. If so, one of the household 
 amongst whom Our Saviour had grown up, one son of His mother, re- 
 deemed the general coldness of the rest. The name of Simon the Zealot, 
 another Galilcean, and that of the only Apostle from Jndea, — Judas, the 
 traitor, of the village of Kerioth, in the south of Judah — close the list. 
 
 Such was the band which Jesus now gathered round Him. At least 
 four — James and John, and James the Little and Jude— seem to have been 
 His relations or connections, to whom, if we accept the tradition I have 
 quoted, we must add Thomas. One, at least, Avas of priestly race,— the 
 degenerate Levite, Matthew, who had sunk to an office held so utterly 
 infamous as a publican's. He and the sons of Zebedee seem to have been 
 in a fair position, but Peter — whom we see, in the forty days after the 
 Besurrection, once more busy as a fisherman, in his boat on the Lake of 
 Galilee ; naked, perhaps literally, as the fishermen there still often are, 
 that he might the better, like them, drag the net after him through the 
 water, as ho swam with it ; or casting his fisher's coat round him, and 
 leaping into the lake to swim ashore to Jesus, — is, it may be, a fair illus- 
 tration of the social positioia of most of his brethren in the Apostolate. 
 / I In the lists given in the Gospels, Peter, the host of His Lord at Caper- 
 
 naum, always holds the first place, but there are variations in the order 
 assigned to others. A true Galilcean, Peter was energetic and fiery, rather 
 than self-contained and reflective. Warm-hearted and impulsive, he had 
 at once the strength and weakness of such a temperament. He is always 
 the first to speak for his brethren ; he craves earnestly one moment what 
 he has earnestly refused the instant before; he is the first to draw the 
 sword for Jesus, but also the first to deny Him. John recognises his risen 
 Master first at the Lake of Galilee, but Peter throws himself forthwith 
 into the lake, and is the first to reach Jesus' feet ; his thoughts flash at 
 once into acts, and he has to be rebuked for too ready counsel. Though
 
 THE CHOICE OF THE TWELVE. 379 
 
 foi' a moment he denies Christ, a look melts him, and tradition only fdls 
 np what we feel a true picture, when it tells us that he rose each night, 
 through life, to pray for forgiveness at the hour at Avhich he had sinned 
 so weakly ; or when it speaks of him, as at last crucified with his head 
 downwards, thinking himself unworthy of a nearer approach to the death 
 of his Lord. 
 
 In Peter, Jesiis had an apostle who gave up his w^holc being to his 
 Master. ISTo one was more receptive of lofty impressions, and with this 
 moral sensibility, there was a ready, quick, happy insight, which divined 
 the significance of Christ's words with swift intelligence. Yet, with this 
 delicacy of forecast, and true conception of the inner and the expressed 
 thoughts of Jesus ; with his quick eye for the signs of the times, and his 
 zeal to act on their indications, he was deficient in sharjo logical power of 
 thought and in tenacious strength of will. In this combination of strength 
 and weakness, he was the most perfect type of the Galilean in the Aposto- 
 late, and became a special friend of Christ, who found in him the most 
 enthusiastic of His followers ; the reflection, in some respects, of His own 
 nature, and a heart than which none beat truer, though in the most decisive 
 moments he proved no firm support, but a bending reed, weak from 
 momentary trust in himself rather than on his Lord. 
 
 James and John, the sons of Zebedce, were men of a different mould. 
 They supplied what was wanting in Peter, Beady to accept the new ideas, 
 and reproducing them for themselves, with mingled enthusiasm and fresh- 
 ness of conception, they had the same intense devotion to their Master as 
 Peter, with something, at times, of the same artless and unconscious self- 
 prominence. Their energy of will, and quick flaming uj) at any op]50si- 
 tion, were marked features of both, and obtained for them, from Jesus, the 
 name of " the Sons of Thunder." In their zeal for His honour they would 
 have called down judgment from heaven against an inhospitable village, 
 and wished to silence an unknown workei', who spoke in His name, though 
 he did not belong to the Twelve. In James, the Apostles had their first 
 mirtyr, but John lived to be the last survivor of them all. Hot zeal, based 
 on intense devotion, was, however, only a passing characteristic, at least 
 of John. He, of all the Twelve, drank deepest into his Master's Spirit, 
 and realized it most. Self-contained, meditative, tender, he thought less 
 of Christ's acts, than of the words which were the revelations of His inner 
 Being. His whole spiritual nature gave itself up to loving contemplation 
 of the wondrous life passing before him. We owe to him, in his Gospel, an 
 image of the higher nature of our Lord, such as only one to whom He was 
 all in all could have painted. If perfect love beget love in return, it was 
 inevitable that John should win the supreme place in Christ's affection. 
 If the disciple leaned on the Master's bosom, it was because he had shown 
 the love that at last brought him, alone, of the Twelve, to the foot of the 
 Cross. 
 
 Of Andrew, the brother of Peter, we know very little. We have to trust 
 wholly to tradition for his history, after Christ's death. He is said, 
 by one legend, to have gone among the Scythians, and, on this 
 ground, the Russians have made him their national saint. Another
 
 380 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 assigns Greece, and afterwards Asia Minor and Thrace, as the scene of his 
 worl<, and speaks of him as put to death in Achaia, on a cross of the form 
 since known by his name. The incidental notices of the others, in the 
 Gospels, are very slight, and need not be anticipated. Philip is said, in 
 the ecclesiastical legends, to have been a chariot driver; Bartholomew, a 
 shepherd or a gardener. But no name is more striking in the list than 
 that of Simon the Zealot, for to none of the Twelve could the contrast 
 be so vivid between their former and their new position. What revolution 
 of thought and heart could be greater than that which had thus changed 
 into a follower of Jesus, one of the fierce war party of the day, who looked 
 on the presence of Eome in the Holy Land as treason against the Majesty of 
 Jehovah — a party who were fanatical in their Jewish strictness and exclu- 
 siveness ? Like many others of the Twelve, he is little more than a name. 
 Indeed, even in the second century, tlie vaguest traditions were all that 
 survived of any but two or three of them. They were men of no high com- 
 manding powers, to make their names rise on all men's tongues, but they, 
 doubtless, in every case but that of the betrayer, did their work faithfully, 
 and effected results of permanent value in the spread of the Kingdom. Still 
 more, they displayed before the world, for the first time, the then amazing 
 spectacle and teaching of a Christian life. That we know so little of men 
 who were such signal benefactors of the race, is only what we have to ponder 
 in the cases of those to whom the world has owed most. It is the law, 
 in the moral as in the physical world, that one sows and another reaps, 
 and the seed which bears the golden cars has long died away unremembered, 
 before the gathering of the autumn sheaves. 
 
 It is touching to think of Jesus surrounded by the little band He had 
 thus chosen — simple, true-hearted men, indeed, but needing so much to fit 
 them for their amazing honour and momentous duties. No wonder they 
 were timid and reverent before Him ; no wonder that He was so sorely 
 tried Avith their dull apprehension and weak human shortcomings, as to 
 speak sternly or sadly to them at times ; once indeed, with the words, " O 
 unbelieving generation, hoAV long shall I be with you, how long shall I 
 suffer you ? " He calls them " of little understanding," " hardened," " fear- 
 ful," " worldly," and " of little faith." But amidst all, they " continued 
 with Him in His trials " till the end, and He fors-ot their failinii;s in tlie 
 tender thought, that if their flesh was weak, their spirit was willing. They 
 were His " brethren," His " servants," His " fellow-workers," His " little 
 children," His "little ones," and, even, as the end approached, "His 
 friends." He might, at times, have to reprove them, but His bearing 
 towards them, day by day, was a loving condescension to their weakness, 
 and a patient effort to draw them to Himself, as far as possible. There is 
 no trace of such formal instruction as the Eabbis give their followers ; 
 they had rather to listen to His words to the people, and ask Him in pri- 
 vate for explanation, Avhere needed. He rather trained and developed their 
 spiritual character, than indoctrinated them in systematic theology. Above 
 all. He lived before them, and was Himself their great lesson. Nor can 
 there be a more striking illustration of the completeness with which they 
 forgot their own being in the presence of their Master, than the silence of
 
 THE CHOICE OF THE TWELVE. 381 
 
 the wi'iters of the Gospels respecting themselves in their records of Jesus. 
 He, alone, filled their eye, their thoughts, their hearts. They had been 
 like children before Him, while He was with them, and in the hallowed 
 reverence of their remembered intercourse. His image filled the whole 
 retrospect, to the utter subordination of all things else. The months they 
 had spent in His company under the palm-trees, or on the hills, or by the 
 sea ; when they breathed the same air with Him, heard His voice, saw His 
 life, and wondered at His mighty acts— raised them, in their own belief, 
 above the prophets and the kings, who had longed for such a vision of the 
 Messiah, but had not had it vouchsafed them. 
 
 Of the preaching of Jesus, the Gospels preserve numerous fragments, 
 but no lengthened abstract of any single discourse, except that of the 
 " Sermon on the_Mouiit." It seems to have been delivered immediately 
 after~the choice of the Twelve, to the disciples at large and the multitude 
 who thronged to hear the new Eabbi. Descending from the higher point 
 to which He had called up His Apostles, He came towards the crowd, 
 which waited for Him at a level place below. There were numbers from 
 every part — from Judea and Jerusalem in the south, and even from the 
 sea-coast of Tyre and Sidon ; some to hear Him, others to be cured of their 
 diseases, and many to be delivered from unclean spirits. The commotion 
 and excitement were great at His appearance, for it had been found that 
 to touch Him was to be cured, and hence, all sought, either by their own 
 efforts or with the help of friends, to get near enough to Him to do so. 
 After a time, however, the tumult was stayed, all having been healed, and 
 He proceeded, before they broke up, to care for their spiritual, as He had 
 already for their physical, wants. 
 
 Tradition has chosen the hill known as the " Horns of Hattin," two 
 horn-like heights, rising sixty feet above the plain between them— two 
 hours west of Tiberias, at the mouth of the gorge which opens, past Mag- 
 dala, into the wild cliffs of Arbela, famous in the history of the Zealots as 
 their hiding-place, and no less so for Herod's battles in mid-air at the 
 mouths of their caves, by means of great cages filled with soldiers let down 
 the precipices. It is greatly in favour of this site, to find such a writer as 
 Dean Stanley saying, that the situation so strikingly coincides with the 
 intimations of the Gospel narrative, as almost to force the inference, that, 
 in this instance, the eye of those who selected the spot was rightly guided. 
 The plain on which the hill stands i^ easily accessible from the lake, and 
 it is only a few minutes' walk from i^. to the summit, before reaching 
 which, a broad "level place "has to be ox'ossed — exactly suited for the 
 gathering of a multitude together. It was to this, apjDarently, that Jesus 
 came down, from one of the higher horns, to address the people. Seated 
 on some slightly elevated rock — for the teacher always sat while he taught 
 — the people and the disciples sitting at His feet, on the grass ; the cloud- 
 less Syrian sky over them ; the blue lake, with its moving life, on the one 
 hand, and in the far north, the grand form of Hermon, glittering in the 
 upper air;— He began what is to us the Magna Charta of our faith, and to 
 the liearers must have been the formal inauguration of the new Kingdom 
 of God. 
 
 I
 
 382 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 The choice of the twelve Apostles and the Sermon on the Mount mark a 
 turning point in the public life of Jesus. A crisis in the development of 
 His work had arrived. He had, till now, taken no steps towards a formal 
 and open separation from Judaism, but had contented himself with gather- 
 ino- converts, whom He left to follow the new life He taught, without any 
 organization as a distinct communion. The symptoms of an approaching 
 rupture with the priests and Eabbis had, however, forced on Him more de- 
 cisive action. He had met the murmurs at the healing of the paralytic, 
 by a triumphant vindication of the language which had given offence. The 
 choice of a publican as a disciple, immediately after, had been a fui^ther 
 expression of the fundamental opposition between His ideas and those of 
 the schools and the Temple, and His justification of the disuse by His dis- 
 ciples of the outward rites and forms which were vital in the eyes of the 
 orthodoxy of the day, had been another step in the same divergent path. 
 He had openly sanctioned the omission of fasts, and of mechanical rules 
 for prayer, which were sacred with the Eabbis. He had even set the old 
 and new order of things in contrast, and had thus assumed independent 
 authority as a religious teacher ; the sum of all offence in a rigid theocracy. 
 
 The choice of the Twelve, and the Sermon on the Mount, were the final 
 and distinct proclamation of His new position. The Apostles must have 
 seemed, to a Jew, the twelve patriarchs of a new spiritual Israel, to be 
 substituted for the old ; the heads of new tribes, to be gathered by their 
 teaching, as the future people of God. The old skins had been proved 
 unfit for the new wine ; henceforth, new skins must be provided ; new forms 
 for a new faith. The society thus organized needed a promulgation of the 
 laws under which it was to live, and this it received in the Sermon on the 
 Mount. 
 
 The audience addressed consisted of the newly chosen Twelve ; the 
 u,nknown crowd who heard Him with favour, and were, hence, spoken of 
 as His disciples ; and the promiscuous multitude, drawn to Him, for the 
 time, by varioiis motives. Jesus had no outer and inner circle, for public 
 and secret doctrines, like the Eabbis ; for, though He explained to the 
 Twelve, in 'private, any points in His discourses they had not understood, 
 the discourses themselves were delivered to all who came to hear them. 
 This Sermon, which is the fullest statement we hav-e of the nature of His 
 kingdom, and of the condition and duties of its citizenship, was spoken 
 under the open sky, to all who happened to form His audience. 
 
 In this great declaration of the principles and laws of the Christian 
 republic — a republic in the relations of its citizens to each other, a king- 
 dom, in their relations to Jesus — the omissions are no less striking than 
 the demands. There is no reference to the priests or Eabbis — till then 
 the undisputed authorities in religion — nor is the rite of circumcision even 
 mentioned, though, as a mere theocratic form, it made the Jew a member 
 of the Old Covenant, apart from moral requirements. It is not con- 
 denmcd, but it is ignored. Till now, a vital condition of entrance into the 
 kingdom of God, it is so no longer. Nor are any other outward forms 
 more in favour. The New Kingdom is to be founded only on righteous- 
 ness and love, and contrasts with the old by its spiritual freedom, un-
 
 THE CHOICE OF THE TWELVE. 383 
 
 trammelled by outward rules. It opposes to the nationality and limitation 
 of the old theocracy, a universal invitation, with no restriction except that 
 of character and conduct. Citizenship is offered to all who sincerely be- 
 lieve in Jesus as the Messiah, and honestly repent before God. Even the 
 few opening sentences mark the revolution in religious conceptions which 
 the new faith involves. Temporal evil, which, under the former dispen- 
 sation had been the mark of Divine displeasure, became, in the teaching 
 of Christ, the mark of fellowship and pledge of heavenly reward. The 
 opinion of the day regarded poverty, hunger, trouble, and persecution as 
 punishments for sin : He enumerates them as blessings. Throughout the 
 whole Sermon, no political or theocratic ideas find place, but only spiritual. 
 For the first time in the history of religion, a communion is founded with- 
 out a priesthood, or offerings, or a Temple, or ceremonial sei'vices ; with- 
 out symbolical worship or a visible sanctuary. There is an utter absence 
 of everything external or sensuous : the grand spiritual truths of absolute 
 religious freedom, love, and righteousness, alone are heard. Nor is the 
 kingdom, thus set up, in itself visible or corporate, in any ordinary sense ; 
 it is manifested only by the witness of the Spirit in the heart, and by the 
 power going forth from it in the life. In the fine words of Herder, Chris- 
 tianity was founded in direct opposition to the stupid dependence on 
 customs, formuljB, and empty usages. It humbled the Jewish, and even 
 the Eoman national pride : the moribund Levitical worship and idolatry, 
 however fanatically defended, were wounded to death. 
 
 Nothing can be more certain than that Jesus had never studied under 
 the Sopherim, or scribes. His contemporaries, the Eabbis of Jerusalem, 
 leave no doubt of this, for they fra,nkly avowed their wonder at His know- 
 ledge of their theology and power of Scriptural exposition, though He 
 had never learned theological science in their schools. The same minute 
 acquaintance with the opinions and teachings of the day is seen through 
 the whole of the Hill Sermon. Apart from His mysterious divinity. He 
 was a man like ourselves, " growing in wisdom " with His years, and, 
 therefore, indebted in a measure, at least, to the influences and means 
 around Him, for His human knowledge and opinions. It speaks volumes 
 for His early training by His mother and Joseph, that He should have 
 known the Scriptures as Ho did, for it is in childhood that the memory 
 gets the bent which marks its strength in manhood. The synagogue 
 school, and constantly recurring services, must, however, have been the 
 great seminary of the wondrous Boy. Passages of the Law had been His 
 only school-book, and, no doubt, the village teacher, steeped in reflected 
 Eabbinism, had often flattered his harmless vanity by a display, before 
 his young charge, of his knowledge of the traditions and glosses, which 
 won so much honour to the scribes. The Sabbath and week-day homilies 
 of the synagogue had made Him a constant listener to local or travelling 
 Rabbis, till, in the thirty years of His Nazareth life. His mind and memory 
 must have been saturated with their modes of thought and the opinions 
 of all the different schools. Theology, moreover, was tlie staple of village 
 conversation in Nazareth, as elsewhere, for the religion of a Jew was also 
 his politics, and the justification of his haughty national pride. Doubt-
 
 384 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 less, also, iu Joseph's cottage there was a manuscript of the Law ; and a 
 soul filled with devotion to His Heavenly Father, like tliat of Jesus, would 
 find some of the Prophets, either there or among His family friends. 
 Eabbis from Jerusalem, or resident iu Galilee, must often have come in 
 His way during the thirty private years, and how much would such a 
 mind and heart learn of their " wisdom," even in casual intercourse ? His 
 clearness of intellect, His transparent innocence of soul. His freedom of 
 spirit, and transcendent loftiness of morals, were all His own, but they 
 must have used, for their high ends, the facilities around Him. The very 
 neighbourhood of a heathen population may have had its influence in 
 breaking down the hereditary narrowness of His race, and who can tell 
 what ardours may have been kindled by the wondrous view from the hill- 
 top of Nazareth ? Free from all thought of Himself ; filled with a Divine 
 enthvisiasm for His Father above, and for humanity ; these mountains, 
 that azure sky, the sweejoing table-land beyond the Jordan, the wide glory 
 of heaven and earth, veiling, above, the eternal kingdoms, and, at His 
 feet, revealing the enchanting homes of wide populations differing in 
 blood and in faith, but all alike His brethren, may have coloured not a 
 few of the sacred utterances of the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
 This unique example of our Saviour's teaching displays in one view 
 nearly all the characteristics presented by the more detached illustrations 
 preserved in the Gospels. Never systematic, the discourses of Jesus were 
 rather pointed utterances of special truths demanded by the occasion. In 
 perfect inner harmony with each other, these sententious teachings at 
 times appear to conflict, for they are often designed to present opposite 
 sides of the same truth, as required by the distinct point to be met. Tlie 
 external and sensuous in all His teachings, however, was always made the 
 vehicle of an inner and heavenly lesson. He necessarily followed the 
 mode to which His hearers were used, and taught them as their own 
 Kabbis were wont, that He might engage attention. At times He puts 
 direct questions ; at others He is rhetorical or polemic, or speaks in pro- 
 verbs, or in more lengthened discourse. He often uses parables, and 
 sometimes even symbolical actions; is always spontaneous and ready; 
 and even, at times, points His words by friendly or cutting irony. But 
 while thus in many ways adopting the style of the Eabbis, His teaching 
 was very different even in outward characteristics. They spoke with a 
 slavish adherence to traditional antecedents, overlaj'iug every address 
 with citations, in their fear of saying a word of their own; but the teach- 
 ing of Christ was the free expression of His own thoughts and feelings, 
 and this, with the weight of the teaching itself, gave Him power over the 
 hearts of His audience. With a minute and exact knowledge of the theo- 
 logy of the schools, He shows, by repeated use of Eabbinical proofs and 
 arguments, that He was familiar, also, with the current modes of contro- 
 versy. His fervour, His originality, and the grandeur of the truths He 
 proclaimed, were enough in themselves to commend His words, but He 
 constantly supports them by the supreme authority of the Scriptures, 
 which were familiar to Him as His mother-speech. Simple, as a rule, in 
 all He says. He yet often opens glimpses into the infinite heights, where
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 385 
 
 no human thought can follow Him. The spirit of His preaching is as 
 transcendent as its matter. Tenderness and yearning love prevail, but 
 there is not wanting, wlien needed, the sternness of the righteous judge. 
 Throughout the whole of His ministry, and notably in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, He bears Himself with a kingly grandeur, dispensing the rewards 
 and punishments of the world to come ; opening the Kingdom of Heaven 
 to those only who fulfil His requirements, and resting the future prospects 
 of men en the reception they give His words. Even to read His utter- 
 ances forces from all the confession of those who heard Him, that " Never 
 man spake like this." 
 
 CHArTER XXXVI. 
 
 THE SERMON ON TUE MOUNT — Contlmiod. 
 
 THE opening verses of the Sermon on the Mount mark the contrast 
 between the New Kingdom of God and the Old. There is no mention 
 of forms, for the whole life of Jesus was one unbroken service of God. 
 The Temple service, and the burdensome laws of sacrifices, are passed 
 over, for the Sermon was delivered in Galilee, far from the splendour of 
 the one, or the vexatious minuteness and materialism of the other. The 
 great question of clean and unclean — which divided the nation within 
 itself, made life a slavery to rules, and isolated the Jew from all brother- 
 hood with humanity at large — is left to sink into indifference before the 
 grand spiritual truths enunciated. The Law came with threats, prohibi- 
 tions, and commands ; the " Sermon " opens with benedictions, and moves 
 in an atmosphere of promises and enticements. Its first sentences are 
 a succession of lofty congratulations of those whose spirit and bearing 
 already proclaim them fit for the new society. 
 
 The virtues thus praised are not the active onlj^ but the passive ; not 
 those only of doing, but of bearing. " Blessed are the poor in spirit, for 
 theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven ; blessed the meek, for they will inherit 
 the earth; blessed they that mourn, for they will be comforted; blessed 
 they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be satisfied ; 
 blessed the merciful, for they will find mercy ; blessed the peace-makers, 
 for they will be called gons of God ; blessed they that have been persecuted 
 for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are 
 ye, when they shall reproach and persecute you, and shall say all manner 
 of evil against you falsely, for My sake. Rejoice and exult, for your 
 reward is great in heaven ; for so did they persecute the prophets that 
 were before you." 
 
 The mission of Christ was said by Himself, in a quotation from Isaiah, 
 to be to preach to the poor, and hence it is with no surprise that we find 
 St. Luke substitute simply " the poor " for the " poor in spirit," for both 
 are right. The first disciples were won almost exclusively from among 
 the lowly. " The contented poor," Jesus would here say, " who bear their 
 burden meekly, since it comes from God — those, that is, who are ' poor in 
 spirit,' — have, in their very meekness, the sign and proof that, though 
 
 c c
 
 386 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 poor in outward things, they are rich in higher, for they will, so much the 
 more surely, be, hereafter, the opposite of what they are now. They are 
 the poor who have nothing and yet have all. They have none of this 
 world's possessions, and have not yet received the blessing in the world to 
 come. But the very longing for the future, and hope of it, are virtually a 
 present possession. Their devout poverty is their wealth, for it secures 
 treasures hereafter. The ' Kingdom of Heaven ' is theirs already." This 
 principle runs through all the beatitudes. As Christ's disciples, the 
 future will be the contrast to the present; riches for poverty; joy for 
 mourning ; plenty for hunger ; a heavenly crown for earthly suffering for 
 the Master's sake. The contrast of sin and pardon ; the lowly sense of 
 needed salvation, which already has in itself the assurance that salvation 
 is granted, are implied in all the states of heart recounted. Through all, 
 there is the deepest sense of the sinfulness and troubles of the present, 
 and springing from this, the loftiest religious aspirations, rising far above 
 the earth, to eternal realities. They thus disclose the inmost and central 
 principle of the new Kingdom; the willing and even joyful surrender of 
 the present, in lowly hope of the future — and that from no lower motive 
 than loving obedience and fidelity to Christ. Immediate self-interest is 
 to be disregarded, for the infinitely higher prospects of the future world. 
 The one passion of the heart is to be for greater I'ighteousness, — that is, 
 for an ever more complete self-surrender to the will of God, and active 
 fulfilment of its demands. Towards Himself, Jesus claims the most loyal 
 devotion, even to the endurance of "all manner of evil," for His sake. To 
 seek happiness is to fail to obtain it, but self-surrender to God, and faith 
 in Christ as the Messiah, in themselves bring it, when disinterested and 
 sincere. 
 
 It is striking to note the anticipations of suffering associated by Jesus 
 with true discipleship. It is assumed as the inevitable result. He holds 
 out no attractions to insincerity or worldliucss ; but at the very outset, fans 
 the chaff from the wheat, and repels all but the earnest and devoted. 
 
 Four benedictions are bestowed on the passive virtues, four on the 
 active. To bear poverty with lowly resignation to God ; to mourn, and 
 yet trust that all is for the best ; to reproduce the moekucss which Jesus 
 Himself displayed; and to endure trials and persecutions loyally for His 
 sake, are the negative graces demanded as conditions of membership of 
 the New Kingdom. But active virtues are no less required : the hunger- 
 ing and thirsting after righteousness, which finds its food in fresh, joyful, 
 continuous acts of goodness ; the mercy which delights to bless the 
 wretched ; the purity of heart which strives to realize in the soul the 
 image of God ; and the gentleness which spreads peace around it. 
 
 The key-note of all the utterances of Clu-ist reveals itself in these few 
 sentences. His kingdom is at once present and future : present by the 
 nndoubting faith in His assurances that it would hereafter assuredly be 
 attained ; future in the fact that the realization of its joys was reserved 
 for the life to come. Unlike John, He proclaims that the time of expec- 
 tation is over: that the New Kingdom has already come as a living power 
 in the soul, diffusing its blessings, at once within and around its members.
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 387 
 
 It is esfcablishod, in its rights and duties, to develop and advance, hence- 
 forth, till its glory cover the earth. In one aspect, it is incomplete till its 
 full realization in the distant future ; in another it is already perfect, for 
 it reigns in every single soul which has humbly accepted Jesus as its 
 King. 
 
 After this introduction, He proceeds to enforce on His disciples the 
 duties of their new relation to Him, and to cheer them, by recalling the 
 dignity it confers. " You have indeed, good cause to rejoice," says He, 
 " and to be brave of heart, for you are the salt of the earth ; the light of 
 the world; a city set on a hill." Mere ostentation, or insincere parade of 
 virtue, were alihorrent to Him, and formed His great charge against the 
 acted religion of the day. But the enthusiasm of true goodness. He tells 
 them, must of necessity be seen and felt. Life is shown by its energy ; 
 where there is no active vital power, there is only death. He prescribes 
 no lengthened code of duties, but trusts to the ardour and devotion of 
 loyalty to Himself, as a perfect equivalent. Drawn to Him as they were 
 by grateful and lowly affection, He leaves it to the love of His followers to 
 exceed all precise directions, and outstrip all formal requireinents. His 
 kingdom is as strictly under law as any other ; but, for the endless statutes 
 of earthly monarchies, and the equally unnumbered prescriptions of the 
 old theocracy. He substitutes a single all-sufficing law— the law of love, 
 which makes each member of His kingdom a law to himself. All are to 
 give themselves up to Him as unreservedly as He has given Himself up 
 for them. 
 
 Intense sincerity is thus made the fundamental demand, and His own 
 personal example their standard and pattern. To be the light of the 
 world, they must needs look to Him, for He had especially applied that 
 name to Himself. They had the immense advantage of example, so much 
 more effective than precept. The New Kingdom was only the reflection 
 of His own character, and, thus. His commands were best cai'ried out by 
 imitating His life ; for He, Himself, was the one perfect illustration of 
 complete fulfilment of its laws. No grudging or partial devotion would 
 suSice. They must heartily conform their inmost being to His image, and 
 shed round them, in their respective spheres, the spiritual blessings 
 which beamed brightest from Himself. Thus calmly, and as His natural 
 right and place. He constitutes Himself the grand ideal of humanity, and 
 men feel that there is no rashness or incongruity in His assumption of the 
 stupendous dignity. 
 
 Failure, however, is human, and hence a few solemn words of warning 
 are added. " Salt keeps and makes sound what would else corrupt. But 
 impure salt may lose its saltness, and once lost it cannot be restored. 
 What was before of blessed use, is henceforth worthless, and may be cast 
 out upon the road, to be trodden under foot. If you, the salt of the earth, 
 lose your spiritual worth, by faint-heartedness, or sloth, or dark unfaith- 
 fulness, your needed energy and efficiency are irreparably gone. Who 
 will take your place ? You will be no longer fit for the work I have 
 assigned you. If the salt be pure, it will not lose its power ; it is the 
 earth and impurities mixed with it, that make it worthless ; and so you
 
 388 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 must put away all that miglit make you go back, if you would be true 
 discii^les. Your lasting worth depends on your devotion to Me being 
 unqualified and absolute. You are to enlighten men as the sun enlightens 
 the world. I am the Light of the world : you shine by My light : see that, 
 in turn, you illumine the darkness round you. A light is to shine, not to 
 be hidden. Like a lamp on its stand, it is your office to shed light, and 
 drive off darkness. The beams of your good works must shine before 
 men, that they may honour God, your Father, in Heaven. Like a city set 
 on a hill, you arc to draw on you all eyes." 
 
 Passing from general principles to specific details, Jesus now proceeded 
 to show the relations of His New Kingdom to the old theocracy. The 
 charge of hostility to the Law had been brought against Him, and would 
 be urged against His disciples. He would show them that the new roots 
 itself in the old, and is its completion and glory, not its destruction. 
 
 " Think not," said He, " that I came to supersede your ancient Scrip- 
 tures—the Law and the Prophets. I came not to destroy, but to fulfil. 
 Worthless forms, worn out with age, may perish, and must ; but not the 
 least jot or tittle of the sacred truths they for a time have clothed, shall 
 pass, while heaven or earth endure. The forms are not the Law. Eites 
 and ceremonies ai-e only helps, for simple ages, which need material 
 symbols. The kingdom of God has now outgrown them. The truth must 
 henceforth stand alone, appealing to the spirit without such outward aids. 
 Local and national, they have served their day, but the New Kingdom of 
 God, which is for all times and races, knows only a worship in spirit and 
 in truth. So far am I from slighting or destroying the truth hidden 
 under these outward forms, that he who breaks one of the least spiritual 
 demands of the Law, and teaches men to copy him in doing so, shall be 
 called least in my kingdom ; while he who obeys and teaches them as a 
 whole, shall be called great in it. The Law is for ever sacred. I only 
 strip it of its outward accidents, to reveal the better its Divine glory. 
 Spoken by God, it is eternal. I come to do ib honour ; to confirm, but also 
 to clear it from human additions and corruptions." 
 
 Jesus, in thus speaking, had a very different conception of the Law 
 from that of the Eabbis. To Him it meant the sacred moral commands 
 given froin Sinai. The whole apparatus of ceremony and rite at first con- 
 nected with them, were only rude external accommodations to the child- 
 hood of religion, to aid the simple and gross ideas of early ages. Looking 
 beneath the symbol to the essential truth, it was a lofty, religious, moral, 
 and social legislation, far deeper, wiser, holier, and more complete than 
 the highest human system. He knew how the prophets had drawn from 
 it the pure and exalted conceptions they had enforced, anticipating in 
 their spirituality His own teaching. But centuries lay between Him and 
 the prophets, and Judaism had sunk to a painful idolatry of the letter and 
 outward form of the Law, to the neglect of its spirit and substance. The 
 Exile had weakened and perverted the national conscience, and a burning 
 zeal for rigid external observance of the letter had followed the just belief 
 that their national troubles had been a punishment for previous short- 
 comings.
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 389 
 
 The Pharisees, who gave the tone to the people, filled up their life with 
 a weary round of offerings, ceremonies, and purifications ; and, not content 
 with the prescriptions of Moses, had added a tedious system of meritorious 
 Avorks— fasts, Avashings, alms, and prayers. The Essenes, and still more, 
 John, had turned back from this barren, mechanical piety, to the purer air 
 of the 2:)rophcty, and had taught that righteousness, love, and human 
 sympatliy, were the highest requirements of the Law. But the veil was 
 still on their eyes ; their reforms were partial. The Essenes had even more 
 washings tlian the Pharisees ; they eschewed marriage, property, and the 
 world, and the Baptist fasted, and imposed Pharisaic rites. Jesus pierced 
 to the heart of the truth. Stripping off all obsolete wrappings of form 
 and symbol, and repudiating all human additions, He proclaimed the Law 
 in its Divine ideal, as binding for ever, in its least part, on all ages. 
 
 His supreme loyalty to the Law could not fail, in a spii'it so divinely 
 sincere, to involve a condemnation of its corruption by the religious 
 teachers of the day. It followed presently : " Except your righteousness 
 exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees," He continued, " ye will not 
 enter into the kingdom of heaven." He charges them not only with 
 breaking the commandments themselves, by their subtle casuistry and 
 their immoral additions, but with leading men at large in the same evil path. 
 
 The fundamental principle of the Pharisaic conception of righteousness 
 which Jesus thus strenuously opposed, was tlieir idea that strict obser- 
 vance of the traditions and commands of their schools in itself satisfied 
 the requirements of God. Fulfilment of what was written in the Law and 
 its Eabbinical expositions, was, in their opinion, only a question of punc- 
 tilious outward observance. They weakened the conception of moral evil 
 by specious sophistical discriminations. In trifles, the most exact minute- 
 ness was required ; but in greater inatters the principles of morality were 
 boldly undermined or surrendered. The tithing of mint, dill and cummin 
 —mere garden herbs — was vital, but grave questions of right and wrong 
 were treated with indifference. This moral prudery and pedantry, which 
 strained the wine before drinking it, lest a fly might have fallen into it and 
 made it unclean, but made no trouble of swallowing a camel, was the hypo- 
 critical risjliteousness against which Jesus directed His bitterest words. 
 With all their lip veneration for the Law, they set little value on the study 
 of it, but much on that of the commentaries of the Rabbis ; now embodied 
 in the Mishn? and Gemara. The Eabbinical tradition so amplified and 
 twisted the woi'ds of the Law as to make it express, in many cases, the 
 opposite of its natural meaning. Religion had become almost wholly a 
 mechanical service, without reference to the heart. As in other theocratic 
 communities, a man might be eminently religious, in the Pharisaic sense, 
 and yet utterly depraved and immoi'al. The teaching o£ the prophets, 
 which deinanded internal godliness, was slighted, and the study of their 
 writings almost entirely put aside for that of the legal traditions and of 
 the Law. The desire to define, to the smallest detail, what the Law 
 required, had led, in the course of ages, to a mass of confiicting Rabbinical 
 opinions, which darkened rather than explained each command. The 
 " hedge " round the Law had proved one of thorns, for Rabbis and people
 
 390 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 alike. The question was, not what was right or wrong, but Avhat the Law, 
 as expounded by the Eabbis, demanded, and zeal was stimulated by the 
 mercenary expectation of an equivalent reward, for scrupiilous exactness 
 in fulfilment. 
 
 A better illustration of the moral worthlessness of the Pharisaic ideas of 
 righteousness could hardly, perhaps, be found, than in the fact that, with 
 all their ostentatious reverence for the Scriptures, he who touched a copy 
 of them Avas thereby made unclean. " According to you," said the Sad- 
 ducees of their rivals, " the Scriptures defile the hands, while Homer does 
 not." The skins on which the sacred books were written might have been 
 those of an unclean beast, or, at least, they were part of a dead body. But 
 the Pharisees had their retort ready. " Why," asked they, " are the bones 
 of an ass clean and those of the high priest, John Hyrcanus, unclean ? '' 
 " It is the kind of bone that determines the uncleanness," answered the 
 Sadducces, " else Ave would make spoons of the bones of our relatives ! " 
 " Just so," retorted the Pharisees, " it is the value we attach to the Scrip- 
 tures which has made us decide that they defile the hands, while Homer does 
 not." They worshipped the letter, but misconceived the essence of Scrip- 
 ture ; treated morality as a trifle, and trifles as the only religion. Fired in 
 their early days by a true zeal for God, they had now degenerated, as 
 a body, into mere " actors." " There were plenty of Pharisees," says even 
 Jost, himself a Jew, " who used the appearance of piety, as a cloak for 
 shameful ends." Nor did this escape the people, especially as these hypo- 
 crites sought to attract attention by exaggei'ated displays — and contemp- 
 tuous bynames wei'e presently given them. The name of Pharisee came to 
 be like that of Jesuit on the lips of friends or opponents. Even Philo does 
 not mention it, and it soon died out of the mouth of the people, and 
 survived only as a term of the schools. 
 
 With a system so utterly hollow, and yet so deeply rooted in popular 
 favour, Jesus could hold no terms. With the better side of Pharisaism He 
 had much in common, but, as it showed itself, in its growing corruption, 
 He could only condemn it. Zealots for words and forms ; lofty in abstract 
 views ; the mouthpiece of the nation at large, in its religious and political 
 aspirations ; there must, nevertheless, have been little real soundness in a 
 body, of which a spirit so gentle as that of Christ could speak as whited 
 sepulchres and a generation of vipers. 
 
 To illustrate His meaning, Jesus proceeds to give examples of Pharisaic 
 abuse of the Law, holding up what is implied in its due observance, that 
 he may show how it was broken by its professed zealous defenders. The 
 sublime morality of the IsTew Kingdom, with its lofty spiritualization of 
 the Law, is, He implies, the true conservatism— it is His ojiponents who 
 are undermining it. 
 
 The Mosaic prohibition of murder had been limited by the Eabbis to 
 literal homicide, and they had added to the brief words of the Law, that 
 the criminal was in danger of the judgment of God in some cases, and of 
 the Sanhedrim in others. But this did not satisfy the high spirituality 
 of the New Kingdom. It included in the brief utterance of God, through 
 Moses, a condemnation even of angry words or thoughts. " I say unto
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 391 
 
 3011, that every one who is angry with his brother will be liable to the 
 judgment of God; and whosoever shall express contempt for liis brother, 
 will be liable to the Sanhedrim ; and whosoever shall say, Thou worthless 
 one, will be lial^le to hell fire. I go beyond the scribes, for I declare, as 
 the fulfiller of the Law, that unrighteous anger is worthy of the full 
 punislimcnt they attach to its overt result in homicide ; nay, more, I 
 decltire the expression of such anger in bitter words as incurring the 
 danger of hell. Not to love one's ' brother ' is, with me, the essence of the 
 crime condemned by the Law : the lesser expressions of anger I denounce 
 as worthy of Divine punishment in this world; in the worst cases, as 
 worthy of punishment in the world to come." Anger with a brother 
 entails the anger and judgment of God : public reproach merits a public 
 penalty, but he who would consign another to hell is himself in danger of 
 being sent thither. Ho does not suppose His disciples could possibly com- 
 mit the crime of murder, or even break into open violence, but He ranks 
 the passions which lead to them in others as equal in guilt. He charges 
 the murder, not against the hand that strikes, but the heart that hates. 
 
 This was startling enough, but the application made of it must have 
 sounded no less so. " Only the pure in heart can see God, and hence it is 
 A-ain for you to seek His presence by an offering, if you have in any way 
 thus offended. If you have, and in the solemn moment of appearing 
 before God remember it — evil thougli men think it to break off or interrupt 
 a sacrifice — leave your offering before the altar ; seek him whom you have 
 wronged, and be reconciled to him, and then, come and offer your gift. 
 You have wronged God, not man onlj'. Beware lest, if you do not make 
 peace with Him, by instant atonement to your brother. He act to you as a 
 creditor does with a debtor he meets in the street — whom he delivers up 
 to the judge, and whom the judge hands over to the oSicer to cast into 
 prison. I tell you, if God thus lot His anger kindle upon you, you will not 
 come out till you have paid the last farthing ! " 
 
 The Pharisaic doctrine of marriage offences and divorce was next un- 
 sparingly condemned, as an inadequate expression of the spirit of the Law. 
 It restricted adultery to the crime itself, and it sanctioned divorce at the 
 mere whim of the husl)and. Doubtless individual Eabbis represented 
 healthier views than others, but they did not affect the prevailing tone. 
 As with homicide, so, in adultery, the morality of the New Kingdom 
 traced the crirae home to the heart, and condemned the unclean glance as 
 a virtual commission of the crime itself. The thoughts were nothing, in 
 the loose morality of the day ; but Jesus arraigns the secret lust of the 
 breast, with an earnestness unknown to the Eabbis. Unconditional self- 
 mortification is to be carried out, when guilty thouglits imperil the soul. 
 " If your right eye," says He, " or your right hand, your sight or your 
 touch, lead you into temptation, it is better for you to pluck out the one, 
 and cut off the other, rather than be led astray, and not only lose a share 
 in My kingdom, but be cast into hell hereafter," Not that He meant this 
 in a hard and literal sense. With Him the sin is in the heart ; but the 
 senses are its instruments, and no guard can be too strict, no self-restraint 
 too great, if spiritual purity be endangered.
 
 392 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 The Pharisaic laws of divorce were shamefully loose. "If any one," 
 said the Eabbis, " see a woman handsomer than his wife, he may dismiss 
 his wife and marry that woman," and they had the andacity to justify this 
 by a text of Scripture. Even the strict Shammai held that if a wife went 
 out without beine shrouded in the veil which Eastern women still wear, 
 she might be divorced, and hence many Eabbis when they went out locked 
 up their wives ! While some held that divorce should be lawful only for 
 adultery, others, like Josephus, claimed the right to send away their wives 
 if they were not pleased with their behaviour. The school of Hillel even 
 maintained that, if a wife cooked her husband's food badly, by over-saltiug 
 or over-roasting it, he might pub her away, and he might further do so 
 if she were stricken by any grievous bodily affliction ! The facility of 
 divo]-ce among the Jews, had, indeed, become so great a scandal, even to 
 their heathen neighbours, that the Rabbis were fain to boast of it as a 
 privilege granted to Israel, but not to other nations ! 
 
 The woman divorced was at once free to marry ; her letter of dismissal, 
 signed by witnesses, expressly granting her the liberty to do so. 
 
 Rising high above all this festering hypocrisy, the law of the New 
 Kingdom sounded oiit, clear and decisive. " It has been said by Moses," 
 continued Jesus, " Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a 
 bill of divorce. But I say unto you. That whosoever shall put away his 
 wife, except for fornication, causes her to be the occasion of adultery if 
 she marry again, for she is still a wife ; and whosoever marries her, Avhen 
 thus put away, commits adultery." 
 
 The use of oaths was no less prevalent in Christ's day than it still is in 
 the East, and the Rabbis had sanctioned the practice by laying down 
 minute rules for its regulation. The law of Moses had absolutely for- 
 bidden perjury, but the casuistry of the Rabbis had so darkened the whole 
 subject of oaths, that they had, in effect, become utterly worthless. They 
 were formally classed under different heads, in Rabbinical jurisprudence, 
 and subtle refinements opened facilities for any one to break them who 
 wished. Their number was endless ; men swore by heaven, by the earth, by 
 the sun, by the prophets, by the Temple, by Jerusalem, by the altar, by the 
 wood used for it, by the sacrifices, by the Temple vessels, by their own heads. 
 
 By joining a second text, from a different part, to that which prohibited 
 joerjury, the scribes had, in effect, opened the door to every abuse. To the 
 prohibition of Moses, "Thou shalt not swear falsely," they had added the 
 charge, " but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths " ; and from this it 
 was argued that no oath was binding, either personally or towards others, 
 which had no vow of sacrifice as a part of it, or if the vow had been 
 punctually fulfilled. Any oath, any deception towards God or man, and 
 even 2:)erjury itself, was thus sanctioned, if it were only consecrated and 
 purified by an offering. The garrulous, exaggerating, crafty Jew needed 
 to be checked, rather than helped in his untruthfulness ; but the guardians 
 of the purity of the Law had invented endless oaths, with nice discrimina- 
 tions, and verbal shades and catches, which did not expressly name God, 
 or the Temple, or the altar, and these the people might use, without 
 scruple ; mock oaths, harmless to themselves and of no binding force !
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 393 
 
 Against such equivocation and consecrated hypocrisy Jesus lifted His 
 voice. "I say unto you, swear not at all; neither by heaven, for it is 
 God's throne; neither by the earth, for it is His footstool; nor by Jeru- 
 salem, for it is the city of the Great King. You would tremble to swear 
 by God ! but when you swear by anything connected with His woi-ks or 
 His worship, you swear, in reality, by Himself. Nor shall you swear by 
 your head, for you cannot make a hair of it white or black ; and, thus, 
 your oaths by it arc idle words. But let your speech be simply, yes, and 
 no, for what exceeds these is from the ' evil one.' As My disciples, your 
 word is enough : speak as ever in the presence of God." 
 
 The theory of life under the New Kingdom, as we -have seen, was the 
 very opposite of that held by the schools of the day. Prosperity, with 
 them, was an unbroken enjoyment of life to extreme old age, abundance of 
 worldl}^ comforts, contuiuous success in all undertakings, and triumphant 
 victory over all enemies. All this was expected as the just reward of a 
 strict obedience to Rabbinical prescriptions, which constituted the " right- 
 eousness of the Law." Jesus held forth the very opposite of all this as 
 the blessedness to be sought in the New Kingdom. Poverty, sorrow, and 
 persecution, were to be the natural lot of His followers ; but their tran- 
 scendent reward hereafter, and the love which inspired such devotion, 
 transfigured these to gain and honour, and demanded the highest joy. 
 
 To make the contrast more vivid between the Old Kingdom and the 
 New, he had added " woes " in connection with all that the former had 
 praised as specially blessed. The rich, who have their reward in theii 
 earthly possessions ; the prosperous, who care for nothing except this 
 Avorld, would suffer hunger hereafter; those who seek only for present 
 joy, would one day mourn and weep ; those whom men praise, would find 
 the praise only deceiving flattery. Patience, humility, gentleness, resigna- 
 tion, and love, the virtues and rewards of the soul, were to characterize 
 the New Israel ; the piety of form, and rewards in this world, were dis- 
 countenanced. The New Kingdom was to win "hearts by spiritual attrac- 
 tions, till now little valued. 
 
 As a practical application of the ideal thus sketched. He required His 
 followers to repudiate the Old Testament doctrine of retaliation, with the 
 wide elaborations of the Rabbis, and to adopt, in its place, the principle 
 of overcoming evil with good. Antiquity, both Jewish and heathen, 
 cherished the klea of revenge for injuries. To requite like with like was 
 assumed as both just and righteous. Even Socrates had no higher idea 
 of virtue than to sui-pass friends in showing kindness, and enemies in 
 inflicting hurt. Plato, indeed, held that revenge was wrong, and that no 
 one should do evil on any ground ; that it was worse to do wrong than to 
 suffer it, and that the virtuous man would not injure any one, Ijecause to 
 do so injured himself. But Plato had only in his mind, in these noble 
 sentiments, the relations of Greek citizens to each other, to the exclusion 
 of slaves and of all the world but his own race ; and the motive for his 
 magnanimity was not love for the individual man, or for ideal humanity, 
 but only political justice and right. Roman stoicism rose higher, but its 
 injunctions of kindness to enemies were rather the expression of self-
 
 394 THE LIFE OF CHRIST, 
 
 approving virtue than of loving moral conviction. Among the Jews, 
 retaliation had the sanction of Moses. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand 
 for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for 
 stripe, are required by him. The stern Sadducee party clung to the letter 
 of the Law, but the milder Pharisees had invented a scale of money pay- 
 ments instead. As in our own Middle Ages, a tariff of fines was con- 
 structed for each personal injury; for teai-ing the hair, for a cuff on the 
 ear, a blow on the back, spitting on the person, taking away an under 
 garment, imcovering a woman's head, and the lilco. The value of a hand, 
 or foot, or an eye, was computed by the depreciation it would have made 
 in the value of a slave. A blow on the ear was variously set at the fine of 
 a shilling or a pound : a blow on the one cheek at two hundred zuzees ; on 
 both cheeks, at double. To tear out hair, to spit on the person, to take 
 away one's coat, or to uncover a woman's head, was compensated by a 
 payment of four hundred zuzees. 
 
 This rude and often mercenary softening of the harshness of the old 
 Law fell wholly below the requirements of the N"ew Kingdom. Its mem- 
 bers must suffer wrong patiently, that the conscience of the wrong-doer — 
 become its own accuser — might be won to repentance by the lesson of 
 unresisting meekness. Christ's own Divine charity and forgiveness were 
 to be repeated by His followers. Sin was to be conquered by being made 
 to feel tlie power of goodness. The present was, at best, only a discipline 
 for the future, and the patient endurance of wrong, with Christ-lili:e love 
 and gentleness, was part of the preparation for the pure joys of tiio 
 Messianic kingdom. " Ye have heard," said He, " that it was said. An 
 eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say iinto you, that ye resist 
 not the evil man ; but whosoever smites thee on the right cheek, turn to 
 him the other also. And to him who desires to contend with thee and 
 take thy coat, leave him thy cloak also. And whosoever shall press thee 
 one mile, go with him two. To him that asks thee, give, and from him 
 that desires to borrow of thee, turn not away." The spirit of such injunc- 
 tions is evident. Hasty retaliation; readiness to stand on one's rights in all 
 cases ; deliberate revenge rather than pity, are unworthy a member of the 
 New Kingdom. It is for him to teach by bearing, yielding, and giving, 
 and not by words only. The virtues he commends he is to illustrate. But 
 it is far from the teaching of Christ that law is to cease, or that the 
 evil-doer is to have everything at his mercy. Only, as far as possible, the 
 principle of His kingdom is to be the purest, deepest, self-sacrificing love. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 THE SERMON ON THE BIOUNT — Conclndcd. 
 
 TESUS had led His audience steji by step to higher and higher cou- 
 ^ ceptions, and now, by an easy transition, raised them to the highest 
 of all. 
 The character of any religion depends on its idea of God. The Jews
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 395 
 
 had no loftier thought of Him thau as a national deity, the Fathei- of Israel 
 and of its proselytes, but not the God of the world at large. They looked 
 on Him also as a jealous God, and the Pharisee urged himself to a painful 
 zeal in his fulfilment of the Law, by the thought that the sins of the 
 father were visited on the third and fourth generation. If he agonized to 
 carry out a thousand minute prescriptions, if the Essene secluded himself 
 in hurtful loneliness, if the Sadducee toiled to discharge all that was re- 
 quired in the service of the Temple, and in the presentation of offerings, 
 if the people mourned in the aj^prehension that God had forsaken them, it 
 was because all alike looked up to a Being who, as they believed, required 
 what they could scarcely render. They should have drawn other con- 
 ceptions from their ancient Scriptures, but they did not. They had alwaj^s 
 learned much that was ti'ue and sublime from the Law and the Prophets — 
 the Majesty of God and the dependence of the creature — the dignity of 
 man as the Divine image, and the kingly relation of Jehovah to Israel, 
 His son. His first-born. His bride, His spouse. They had never lost the 
 conviction that their nation could not jierish, because the honour of God 
 was pledged to defend it, and they even looked forward, with a frenzied 
 earnestness, to a future when He would send His Messiah, and raise them 
 above all the nations. As Jews, many doubtless drew comfort from the 
 Divine words, that, like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth 
 them that fear Him. But their theology had sunk to a mere mercenary 
 relation of performance and reward. The idea of a strict return of good 
 for good, or evil for evil, extended to the next world as well as this, and, at 
 the best, God was only the Father of Israel, not of mankind. Still, above 
 all, the Master, looking for service from man as the servant — the fond 
 thought of His fatherhood, even in its limited national sense, grew more 
 and more common as Christ's day drew near. The Jew was being educated 
 for the Divine announcement of the whole truth. 
 
 The heathen world, also, had long been unconsciously preparing for its 
 proclamation. Greek philosophy had spoken of the Father of gods and 
 men. Man was the Divine image and of Divine origin — the friend, the 
 fellow-citizen, the emanation, the son, of God. A generation later, in an 
 insincere age, when fine words were used as mere rhetorical flourishes, 
 springing from no conviction or earnestness, Seneca was able to speak 
 almost like a Christian. " The gods," said he, " are full of pity and friend- 
 liness—do everything for our good, and for our benefit have created all 
 kinds of blessings with exhaustless bounty, and prepared everything for 
 us beforehand. What they have they make over to us : that is how they 
 use things ; and they are unwearied, day and night, dispensing their 
 benefits as the protectors of the human race. We are loved by them as 
 children of their bosom, and, like loving parents, they smile at the faults 
 of their children, and cease not to bestow kindness on kindness to us ; 
 give us before we ask, and continue to do so, although we do not thank 
 them, and even though we cry out defiantlj^ ' I shall take nothing from 
 them ; let them keep what they have for themselves !' The sun rises over 
 the unjust, and the seas spread out even for sea robbers. The gods are 
 easily appeased, never unforgiving; how unfortunate were we if they were
 
 396 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 not so ! " Thus also " The -way of man, in which the god-like walks, goes 
 upwards to the gods, who reach out the hand to us without pride or 
 jealousy, to help us to rise. We need no temple, nor even to lift up our 
 hands to heaven : God is near thee ; the Holy Spirit, the Watcher over 
 good or evil, who ever, unweariedly, leads us to God." Words like these 
 sound Christian, though we know that they were only artificial rhetoric, 
 composed to turn aside the charge of worshipping stocks and stones. 
 Faith in the divinity often gives way, in Seneca, to haughty pride in 
 humanity, and that pride, in turn, sinks before the dark future. The fancy 
 played over the dark abyss with empty words of comfort, respecting the 
 father-like gods and god-like man, but even prosperity could hardly amuse 
 itself with them, and the hour of trial repeated them with hollow laughter 
 and self-murder. Yet they were there to use for the highest good, had 
 men chosen. The religious education of the world had gradually, through 
 long ages, become ready for the teachings of Jesus. 
 
 When the Sermon on the Mount was delivered every sign of the wrath 
 of God with the nation lay on it like a burden, and per^jlexed the masters 
 in Israel. Yet it was then that Jesus revealed God as the Father of men, 
 who had loved them from the beginning of the world ; appealing for proof 
 even to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. For the first time, 
 men heard that their whole race were sons of the great heavenly Father ; 
 that the world lay in the sunshine of His eternal love, and that all alike 
 were invited to seek His face. It was the fiirst proclamation of a universal 
 religion, and, as such, an event unique in the history of mankind. In the 
 early ages of the world, war was perpetual. Even after men had long 
 adopted city life and its civilization, a stranger and an enemy were 
 synonymous. Thus, in the first ages of Borne, a stranger who had not 
 put himself formally under the protection of some Eoman, had no rights 
 and no protection. What the Eoman citizen took from him was as lawful 
 gam as the shell which no one owned, picked up on the sea-shore. He was 
 like a wild beast, to be hunted and preyed on at any one's will. To use 
 Mommsen's figure, a tribe or people must be either the anvil or the ham- 
 mer. Ulysses was only the type of the world at large in his day, when, 
 m the early part of his wanderings, he landed in Thrace, and having found 
 a city, instantly sacked it and killed all the inhabitants. Where there was 
 no express treaty, plunder and murder were always to be dreaded. The 
 only safety of individuals or communities was their own capacity of self- 
 defence. As tribes and clans expanded to nations, the blood connection 
 secured peace, more or less, in the area they occupied, and, ultimately, the 
 interests of commerce, or the impulse of self-preservation, joined even 
 states of different nationalities in peaceful alliances. Isolated nations, 
 like the Jews, still kept up the intense aversion to all but their own 
 race, but the progress of the world made this more and more excep- 
 tional. ' 
 
 Before the age of Christ, the conquests of Eome had broken down the 
 dividing walls of nationality over the civilized earth, and had imited all 
 lands under a common government, which secured a widespread peace, 
 hitherto unknown. Men of races living far apart found themselves free
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 397 
 
 to compete for the highest honours of public life or of letters, and Eome 
 accepted men of genius, and even emperors, from the obscure poi^ulations 
 of the provinces. 
 
 But though conquest had forced the nations into an outward unity, there 
 was no real fusion or brotherhood. Man, as man, had gained nothing. 
 The barbarian and the slave were no less despised than before, and had 
 secured no more rights. The Romans had been forced, for their own 
 sakes, to raise the conquered to more or less political equality with them- 
 selves, but they did so from no sentiment of respect to them as fellow-men, 
 and still bore themselves towai-ds them with the same haughty superiority 
 and ill-concealed aversion. It was the peace of political and even moral 
 death. All mankind had become the slaves of the despot on the Tiber. 
 Ancient virtues had passed away, and vice and corruption, unequalled 
 perhaps in any age, lay like a deadly miasma over universal society. The 
 union of the world was regretted, as superseding the times when Rome 
 could indulge its tastes in war and plunder. It was a political compre- 
 hension, not a moral federation. The hostility of. the past was impossible, 
 but the world had only become a mob, not a brotherhood, of nations, and 
 had sunk in morality as it had advanced in outward alliance. 
 
 With the Jews, the old hatred of all races but their own had grown with 
 the calamities of the nation. It seemed to them a duty to hate the heathen 
 and the Samaritan, but their cynicism extended, besides, to all in whom 
 their jealousy for the honour of the Law saw cause for dislike. They 
 hated the publicans; the Rabbi hated the priest, the Pharisee the Sad- 
 ducee, and both loathed and hated the common people, who did not know 
 the ten thousand injunctions of the schools. They had f&rgotten what the 
 Old Testament taught of the love of God towards men, and of the love 
 due by man to his fellow. They remembered that they had been com- 
 manded to show no favour to the sunken nations of Caanan, but they 
 forgot that they had not been told to hate them. The Law had said, 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself ; " but their neighbour, they 
 assumed, meant only a Jew or a proselyte, and they had added that they 
 should " hate their enemies." " If a Jew see a Gentile fall into the sea," 
 wrote Maimonides, still cherishing the old feeling centuries later, " let him 
 by no means take him out ; for it is written, ' Thou shalt not rise up 
 against the blood of thy neighbour,' but this is not thy neighbour." The 
 spirit of revenge which jjrevailed, embittered even private life among the 
 Jews themselves. Each had his own enemies, whom he felt free to hate 
 and to injure, and all, alike, hated whole classes of their own nation, and 
 the whole heathen races. 
 
 Jesus Avas, now, by a simple utterance, to create a new religious era. 
 " Ye have heard," said He, " that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour 
 and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you. Love your enemies, and pray 
 for them who persecute you ; that ye may become sons of your Father, 
 who is in heaven ; for he makes His sun to rise on the evil and good, and 
 sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous. For if ye love them that 
 love you, what reward have ye in my kingdom ? Do not even the hated 
 publicans the same ? And if ye salute your brethren only, Avhat do ye
 
 398 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 that exceeds ? Do not even the heathen Gentiles the same thing ? Be ye, 
 therefore, perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." 
 
 It was a new era for man. Heathenism had fme sentiments, but they 
 were supported by no high morality, and no living hopes. The Old 
 Testament often commended kindness and mercy, but it also sanctioned 
 revenge and triumph over the fall of an enemy, and, even in the most 
 attractive passages, it seemed as if piety were expected to make the anger 
 of God on one's adversaries the more certain. But Jesus throws down the 
 dividing prejudices of nationality, and teaches universal love without 
 distinction of race, merit, or rank. A man's neighbour, henceforth, was 
 every one who needed help, even an enemy. All men, from the slave to 
 the highest, were sons of one Father in heaven, and should feel and act 
 towards each other as brethren. No human standard of virtue would 
 suffice ; no imitation of the loftiest examples among men. Moral perfection 
 had been recognised, alike by heathen and Jews, as found only in likeness 
 to the Divine, and that Jesus proclaims as, henceforth, the one standard 
 for all humanity. AVith a sublime enthusiasm and brotherly love for the 
 race. He rises above His age, and announces a common Father of all 
 mankind, and one great si^iritual ideal in resemblance to Him. 
 
 With this grand truth of Christianity the relation of man to his Maker 
 was entirely changed. The loyalty of a child to a father took the place of 
 fear, as a motive to His service. A new spiritual kingdom of filial love 
 and obedience was called into being, with tender yearnings after Him, and 
 childlike devotion to His will — a kingdom in which the humble, the meek, 
 and the merciful found their heaven, and in which all who hungered and 
 thirsted after righteousness felt that they could bo satisfied. The pure in 
 heart were, as such, its citizens ; the souls who love the things of peace 
 Avcre called its children, and those who bore persecution and sorrow for 
 the sake of righteousness were to inherit it. 
 
 To be " perfect as the great Father in heaven is j^erfect," is to do God's 
 will on earth as the angels do it above, and, hence, the New Kingdom is 
 thus spoken of elsewhere. It was to be wholly spiritual, in contrast to 
 the political dreams of the Pharisees. They had transformed the predic- 
 tions of the prophets to a political programme, which should be realized 
 by war against Eome, and zealous agitation against the Sadducean aristo- 
 cracy. They thought of another Maccabasan war, to be follou'ed by a 
 revelation of the Messiah from heaven. The kingdom of Jesus, on the 
 contrary, was not to rise like a state, so that men could say it was here, or 
 there, because it was already in their midst. It could not be otherwise. 
 He had proclaimed that God was the great Father, and, as such, the 
 loving, fervent desire that they might be His children thrust aside the 
 cold thought of reward, which had hitherto ruled. He proclaimed that 
 God loved them, not in return for their services, but from the love and 
 tenderness of a Father's heart, which sent forth His sun over good and 
 bad alike, and rejoiced more at a sinner's repentance than over the weary 
 exactness in Rabbinical rules of ninety and nine who thought themselves 
 righteous. The fundamental principle of the Judaism of the day was 
 undermined by the new doctrine. What need was there for offerings, for
 
 THE SEEMON ON THE MOUNT. 399 
 
 Temple ritual, for washings or fastings, or scrupulous tithings, when the 
 great Father sought only the heart of His penitent child? The hope of 
 the Eabbis that they could hold God to the fulfilment of what they thought 
 His promises, if only the Mosaic ideal of the theocracy, in their sense, was 
 restored, fell to the ground. The isolation of the Jews, and their glory as 
 the chosen people of God, were things of the past. One part of the theo- 
 cracy after the other was doomed to fall before this grand proclamation, 
 for its foundations were sapped. The Fatherhood of God, which to-day 
 falls like an empty sound on the ear of the miiltitude, was, at its first 
 utterance, the creation of a new world. 
 
 Jesus had now set forth the characteristics of citizenship in His ISTew 
 Kingdom, and the new law ; He passed, next, to the new life. A warning 
 was needed to guard His followers, in their religious duties, from the 
 abuses of the Eabbinical party. 
 
 Al msgiv ing had been exalted by the scribes to an act in itself merito- 
 rious befoi'e God. The words " alms," and " righteousness," were, indeed, 
 used interchangeably. " For one farthing given to the poor," said the 
 Eabbis, " a man will receive heaven." The words, " I shall behold Thy 
 face in righteousness," were rendered in the gloss "because of alms." 
 " This money," said others, " goes for alms, that my sons may live, and 
 that I may obtain the world to come." '"' A man's table now expiates by 
 alms, as the altar, heretofore, did by sacrifice." " He who gives alms will 
 be kept from all evil." In an age when the religious spirit was dead, out- 
 ward acts of religion were ostentatiously practised, at once to earn a 
 reward from God, and to secure honour for holiness fi'om men. Eeligion 
 was acted for gain, either present or future. Against such hypocrisy, 
 Jesus warns His followers. " Take heed that ye do not your righteousness 
 before men, to be seen by them, otherwise you have no reward with your 
 Father who is in heaven." They were not to draw attention to their 
 charity, by having it proclaimed in the synagogue, or by ostentatiously 
 giving it in the streets, to earn praise of meu, but v,'ere to hide it as if 
 they would not even let their left hand know what their right hand was 
 doing. Sincerity, only, gave charity value. The amount was not essen- 
 tial : the spirit was all. Insincerity had no reward but the empty honour 
 from men, got by deceit ; sincerity was rewarded by their Father in 
 Heaven, who saw the secret deed. 
 
 Even prayer had become a formal, mechanical act, prescribed by exact 
 rules. TheTiours, the matter, the manner, were all laid down. A rigid 
 Pharisee prayed many times a day, and too many took care to have the 
 hours of prayer overtake them, decked in their broad phylacteries, at the 
 street corners, that they might publicly show their devoutness— or went 
 to the synagogue that the congregation might see it. ISTor were they con- 
 tent with short prayers, but lengthened their devotions as if to make a 
 merit of their duration. Instead of this, the members of the New King- 
 dom were to retire to strict secrecy when they prayed, and address their 
 Father who sees in secret, and He would reward them hereafter, in the 
 future world, for their sincerity. ISTor were they to use the foolish repeti- 
 tions in vogne with the heathen, who thought they would be heard for
 
 400 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 their much speaking. The great Father knows what we need before we 
 ask Him, and requires no lengtliened petitions. Prayer in the congrega- 
 tion is not forbidden, for Jesus Himself frequented the s}'nagogue, and 
 joined in public devotions. But private prayer must be private, to guai-d 
 against human weakness corrupting it into worthless parade. The sim- 
 plest, shortest prayer, unheard by human ear, is accej^ted of God, if it rise 
 from the heart : if the heart be wanting, all prayer is mere form. 
 
 It is always much easier, however, to follow a pattern than a precept, 
 and, hence, Jesus proceeded to set before them a model prayer. " After 
 this manner, therefore, pray ye. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed 
 be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so also 
 on earth. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts (to 
 Thee), as we, also, have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into 
 temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." He added that our being 
 forgiven our trespasses by God depended on our forgiving men theirs 
 against us. 
 
 It was the custom of every Rabbi to teach his disciples a form of prayer, 
 and in " The Lord's Prayer," Jesus, as John already had done, followed 
 the example. But what a difference between His model and that of other 
 teachers ! He had created a new heaven and a new earth for the soul, and 
 in this prayer the mighty revelation of the Fatherhood of God shines, like 
 a sun, over all humanity. The highest conceivable ideal of perfection and 
 felicity for the race, is offered in the will of the Eternal Father being done 
 on earth as it is in heaven. Childlike trust and dependence ask, and are 
 contented with, daily bounty from that Father's hand. His mercy is 
 pleaded by hearts that already have learned to show it to others. The 
 spirit stands before Him clothed in humility, and full of love and tender- 
 ness towards its fellows. Conscious weakness stretches out its hand for 
 heavenly help, distrusting itself, but strong in a Higher. Each clause, 
 almost each word, is full of the deepest significance. Each is filled with 
 Divine light. After eighteen centuries, Christendom knows no expression 
 of thoughts and feelings so full in so small a compass ; so rich, so majestic 
 in praise and petition. Hallowed phrases, current in His day, may be 
 quoted as parallels of single parts, but He alone united them to words of 
 His own with a breadth and solidity, a childlike simplicity and wisdom, a 
 strength and lowliness wholly unknown in Jewish literature. 
 
 IJ^stjug had become one of the prominent religious usages of our 
 Saviour's day. Though only one fast had been appointed by Moses-that 
 of the Day of Atonement —the Pharisees had added numerous others, 
 especially on the two days of the week, Monday and Thursday, on which 
 synagogue worship was held. VYhen fasting, they strewed their heads 
 with ashes, and neither washed nor anointed themselves nor trimmed their 
 beards, but put on wretched clothing, and showed themselves in all the 
 outward signs of mourning and sadness used for the dead. Insincerity 
 made capital of feigned humiliation and contrition, till even the Roman 
 theatre noticed it. In one of the plays of the time, a camel, covered with a 
 mourmng cloth, was led on the stage. " Why is the camel in mourning? " 
 asked one of the players. " Because the Jews are keeping the Sabbath
 
 THE. SERMON ON THE MOUNT. 401 
 
 year, and grow notliing, but arc living on thistles. The camel is mourning 
 because its food is thus taken from it." Eabbis were forbidden to anoint 
 themselves before going out, and it was recorded of a specially famous 
 doctor, that his face was alwaj-s black with fasting. All pretence was 
 abhorrent to the soul of Jesus, especially in religion. " When ye fast," 
 said He, " be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance ; for they dis- 
 figure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Yerily I say 
 unto you. They have their reward. But do thou, when thou fastest, anoint 
 thine head and wash thy face ; that thou mayest not appear unto men to 
 fast, but to thy Father who is in secret, and thy Father, who sees in secret, 
 will reward thee." To seek effect, applause, credit, or gain, by a show of 
 godliness, must be shunned by members of the New Kingdom. It would 
 be better to let men think evil of them, than to be tempted to use religion 
 for ulterior ends. True pain and true sorrow hide from the ej^e of 
 strangers ; they withdraw to the secrecy of the l;rcast. 
 
 He had already spoken of the need of care in the right use of the 
 blessings of life ; but He knew our proneness to forget, and returns to the 
 subject once more. " Heap not up for yourselves," said He, "treasures on 
 earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through 
 and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither 
 moth nor rust consumes, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. 
 For, if 3'our treasure is on earth, your heart must needs be careless of 
 heaven. But if it be in heaven, your hearts will be there also. To have 
 it there, you must have the inner light in your souls, your mind and heart 
 — bj- which 3'ou perceive and cherish the truth — unclouded. H they be 
 darkened, it will turn your heart away from the right and Divine. The 
 body without the eye is in darkness ; for light enters -only by the eye, as 
 from a lamp. When your eye is sound, your body is full of light ; when it 
 is darkened, all within is m'glit. So it is with the eye of the soul." 
 
 " Do not fancy," he continued, " that you can strive at once for riches 
 and for the kingdom of God. They are absolutely opposed. ISTo man can 
 serve two masters whose interests are opposite. Either he will hate the one 
 and love the other, or he will hold to the one and despise the other. You 
 cannot worship the God of heaven, and Mammon, the god of wealth. To 
 serve God, and yet make money your idol, is impossible ! " 
 
 " An undivided heart, which worshijis God alone, and trusts Him as it 
 should, is raised above anxiety for earthly wants. Therefore, I say unto 
 you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, nor yet for your body, 
 Vvdiat ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body 
 than the raiment ? Behold the birds of the air ; they sow not, neither 
 reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. 
 Are ye not much better than they? Which of you, by anxious thought, 
 can add one cubit to the length of his life ? And about raiment why are 
 ye anxious ? Consider the lilies of the field, how fair and beautiful they 
 grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon, in his royal 
 robes, was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothe the grass 
 of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into an oven, will He 
 not much more clothe you, ye of little faith ? Be not, therefore, anxious, 
 
 D B
 
 402 THE LIFE or CHRIS1\ 
 
 saying, Wliat shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall wo put 
 ou P For the Gentiles seek after all these things. But your Heavenly 
 Father knows that ye have need of them. Seek, first, His kingdom and 
 righteousness, and they shall all be added to you. Be not, therefore, 
 anxious for the morrow. The morrow will Lave its own cares. Each day's 
 evil is sufficient for the day." He enjoins not idle indifference and easi- 
 ness of temper, but the freedom from care of a soul which firmly trusts in 
 the Providence of God. The citizens of the N'ew Kingdom might well 
 confide in their Heavenly Father, and amidst all the trials and straits even 
 of such a martyr life as had been predicted for them, might and should 
 retain calm and unshaken confidence in the sustaining and guiding wis- 
 dom and love of God. As His children, they had an express right to look 
 for His all-sufficient care. 
 
 No vice was more rank among the Jews, through the influence of theu^ 
 priestly and Eabbinical leaders, than narrovf bigotry, which condemned 
 all opinions varying in the least from their own. They were trained to 
 take it for granted that their whole religious system, in its minutest forms 
 and rules— their religious thought, faith, and life — had been revealed by 
 God from heaven. They were a nation of fanatics, ready to fight to the 
 death for any one of the ten thousand ritual injunctions of their religions 
 teachers. A discourse designed to proclaim the advent, character, and 
 laws of the new theocracy, could not close without touching on the duties 
 of social life, and laying down j^rinciples for guidance. Christ had en- 
 joined the broad law of gentle love, as the rule for intercourse with men 
 at large. He now illustrates it in additional applications. 
 
 "Judge not," said He, "that ye be not judged (by God); condemn not, 
 and ye shall not be condemned ; forgive, and ye shall be forgiven. For 
 Avith what judgment ye judge (men) ye shall be judged (hereafter). Give, 
 and it will be given to you ; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, 
 running overj Avill they give into your bosom. For with what measure ye 
 mete, it shall be measured to you. Be charitable respecting the errors 
 and shortcomings of others, that you may not have your own sins brought 
 against you at the great day, and find there the condemnation you have 
 yourself pronounced here. It is a fearful thing for you, who are to teach 
 men, to fall away from the truth, for how, then, will you instruct sinful 
 men aright ? H the blind attempt to lead the blind, both fall into a ditch; 
 and if yourselves be wrong you cannot lead others, Avho know nothing of 
 it, to the salvation of the New Kingdom. You will both go more and 
 more hopelessly astray till, at last, you sink into Gehenna, Those you 
 teach cannot be wiser than you, their teachers, for a disciple is not above 
 his master, but comes, at best, in the end, to be like him. If, then, you 
 would not be blind leaders of the blind, take care, before you essay to 
 judge and better the religious state of others, to examine your own spiritual 
 condition, and reform whatever is wrong in it. Why should you mark the 
 atom of straw or dust that is in your Ijrother's eye— his petty fault— if 
 you do not, in your self -righteousness, see the beam that is in your own 
 eye ? Self-blinded hyprocrite ! first cast the beam out of your own eye, 
 and then you will see clearly to cast the mote out of your brother's eye."
 
 THE SEEMON ON THE MOUNT. 403 
 
 " You v.-ill meet with men," He coutiiuied, " who, wlieu the Divine truth 
 is offered them, will only profane it —men utterly imgodly and hardened, 
 who wilfully reject the counsel of God, with blasphemy, mocking, and 
 slandering. Do not put it in their power to dishonour it. To do so is 
 like casting a holy thing to the street dogs, or throwing pearls before wild 
 swine, who would only trample them under their feet, as worthless, and 
 turn against yourselves and rend you." 
 
 " You will need help from God in your great task; for your own spiritual 
 welfare, and for success in your work. Ask, therefore, and it will be given 
 you ; seek, and ye will find ; knock, and it will be opened to you. For 
 every one that asks receives ; and he that seeks finds ; and to him that 
 knocks it shall be opened. If your son ask bread, do you mock him by 
 giving him a stone ? or, if he ask a fish, do you mock him by giving him 
 a serpent ? or, if he ask an egg, will you give him a scorpion ? You need, 
 then, have no fear of refusal of spiritual help from your heavenly Father, 
 for if you who are sinful, though members of the New Kingdom, would not 
 think of refusing to supply the wants of your children, far less will your 
 Father above refuse you. His spiritual children, what you need." 
 
 Jesus had now come to the close of His exposition of the nature and 
 duties of His kingdom, and ended His statement of them by a brief re- 
 capitulation and summary of all He had said of the latter, in their relation 
 to men at large. " All things, therefore, whatsoever ye would that men 
 should do to you, do ye also so to them, for this is the Law and the Pro- 
 phets." The Law had said, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," 
 but it had meant by neighbour a Jew or a proselyte, and had commanded 
 the extirpation of the Canaanites, and sanctioned merciless war with the 
 heathen around. These grand words were, therefore, a rule for the nation 
 towards its own members, but no great laAV for mankind. But Jesus 
 ignores this narrowness, and proclaims all men brethren, as common 
 children of one Father in Heaven. This golden rule had been proclaimed 
 more or less fidly before. It is found in Socrates and Menander, and 
 even in the Chinese classics. Philo quotes, as an old Jewish saying, " Do 
 not to others what you would be unwilling to suffer ; " and the Book of 
 Tobit enjoins, " Do that to no man which thou hatest." In the generation 
 before Jesus it had been repeated by Hillel to a heathen, who mockingly 
 asked him if he could teach him the whole Law while he stood on one foot. 
 "What you would not like done to yourself, do not to tliy neighbour," 
 replied the Kabbi — " this is the whole Law : all the rest is a commentary on 
 it — go, learn this." But, as Hillel gave it, this noble answer was only mis- 
 leading. It was striking to find a Rabbi with such enlightened insight 
 into the essence of the Law, as to see that all its ordinances and rites 
 had a moral end ; but it was also much more than a mere code of morals 
 between man and man. Its fitting summary is much rather that central 
 requirement uttered each day, even now, by every Jew in his prayers — - 
 " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy 
 soul, and with all thy might." Morality, apart from its religious basis 
 and supreme enforcement, degrades the Law to a level with the common 
 moi'ality of the world at large. It was reserved for Jesus to announce our
 
 404 TUB LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 duty to man in its subordination to our higher rchition to God; to make 
 it only part of that filial love which reflects on all our Ijretlu-en the tender- 
 ness it feels supremely towards their Father and ours, in Heaven. With 
 Him, love of universal humanity has its deep religious ground in the love 
 of God— whom we are to resemble — towards all the race, as His children. 
 The love of man, He tells us, is the second great commandment, not the 
 first ; it is the moon shining by light borrowed from that Sun. The 
 highest of the Eabbis cannot stand in the presence of the Son of Mary ! 
 
 He had reached His peroration. It remained only to add solemn warn- 
 ings, and these He now gave. " Enter in," said He, " through the narrow 
 gate, for narrow is the gate and straitened is the way of self-denial and 
 struggle that leads to life, and few there are that find it. But wide is the 
 gate and broad is the vray of sin that leads to destruction, and those who 
 enter through it arc many. Beware of false teachers, who would turn you 
 aside from the safe road. They will come to you affecting to be my fol- 
 lowers, but they will be only wolves in sheep's clothing. You will know 
 thorn fully by their fruits— that is, by their lives. Do men gather grapes 
 off thorns, or figs off thistles ? So, every good tree brings forth good 
 fruit ; but the corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit. The good, out of the 
 good treasure of the heart, bring fortli that which is good ; and the evil 
 man, out of the evil, brings forth that which is evil ; for out of the abund- 
 ance of the heart liis mouth siDeaks. A good tree cannot bring forth evil 
 fruit ; neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Have nothing to 
 do with them, and do not follow them, for every tree that brings not forth 
 good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire. So, then, by their fruits ye 
 will know them fully. 
 
 " Nor is the danger of being led astray bj^ false teachers, light, for not 
 all who acknowledge me as their Master will enter into the glory of the 
 heavenly Kingdom, but those only who do the will of My Father, who is 
 in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, ' Lord, Lord, did we not 
 teach in Thy name confessing Thee as Jesus Messias, and by the power of 
 Thy name cast out devils, and, by the same power, did we not do many 
 mighty works, owning Thee, and working through Thee, in all things ? ' 
 And then shall I say unto them', ' I never knew you : depart from me, ye 
 that work iniquity.' Take warning, for even some of you call me Lord, 
 Lord, and do not the things which I say." 
 
 That one in the position of Jesus — an unknown Galila3an ; untrained in 
 the schools ; in early manhood ; with no suppoi^t from the leai'ned or the 
 powerful— should have used such words, in a discourse so transcendently 
 lofty in its teachings, is to be explained only on the ground that He spoke 
 with a Divine consciousness of being the Messiah, who should hereafter be 
 the Judge of mankind. He calmly founds a kingdom in which the only 
 rewards and punishments are those of the conscience here, and those of 
 eternity, after death. He bears Himself, and speaks, as a King ; super- 
 sedes or perfects the laws of the existing theocracy as He thinks best ; 
 invites adherents, but warns off all except the truly godly and sincere, 
 by holding out the most discouraging prospects through life ; keeps aloof 
 from the civil or ecclesiastical authorities, and acts independently of both.
 
 THE SEEMON ON THE MOUNT. 405 
 
 Finally, as the one law of His invisible kingdom in the souls of men, He 
 requires supreme love and devotion to Himself, and demands that this be 
 shown by humble and continuous efforts after likeness to God, and by the 
 imitation of His own pure and universal love to mankind. To have con- 
 ceived a spiritual empire so unique in the histoiy of religion, is to have 
 proved His title to His highest claims. 
 
 His concluding words are in keeping with these. He had announced 
 that He would judge the world at the great day, and now makes hearty 
 acceptance and performance of His commands the condition of future sal- 
 vation or ruin. " Every one, therefore (now, or hereafter), who hears these 
 sayings of mine and obeys them, is like a man, who, in building a house, 
 digged deep, and laid a foundation upon the rock. And the Aviuter rains 
 fell, and the torrents rose, and the storms jjlew, and beat upon that house, 
 and did not shake it, because it was well built, and had been founded upon 
 the rock. But every one who hears them, and does not obey them, is like 
 a foolish man, who, without a foundation, built his house upon the sandy 
 earth. And the rain descended, and the torrents rushed down, and the 
 winds blew, and beat upon that house, and straightway it fell, and the ruin 
 of that house was great." 
 
 No wonder that, when He had finished such an address, the multitudes 
 were astonished at His teaching. They had been accustomed to the tame 
 and slavish servility of the Rabbis— with their dread of varying a word 
 from precedent and authority ; their cobwebbery of endless sophistries 
 and verbal trifling ; their laborious dissertations on the infinitely little ; 
 their unconscious oversight of all that could affect the heart ; their indus- 
 trious trackings through the jungle of tradition and prescription — and felt 
 that in the preaching of Jesus, they, for the first time, had something that 
 stirred their souls and came hom.e to their consciences. One of the Rabbis 
 had boasted that every verse of the Bible was capable of six hundred 
 thousand different explanations, and there were seventy different modes 
 of interpretation current, but the vast mass of explanations and interpre- 
 tations were no better than pedantic folly, concerning itself with mere 
 insignificant minutiaj which had no bearing on religion or morals. Instead 
 of this, Jesus had spoken as a legislator, vested with greater authority 
 than Moses. To transmit, unchanged, the traditions received from the 
 past, Avas the one idea of all other teachers ; but He, while reverent, 
 was not afraid to criticize, to reject, and to supplement. To venture on 
 originality and independence was something hitherto unknown. 
 
 The life of Jesus, in all its aspects, is the great lesson of humanity : His 
 death is its hope. But there lies a wondrous treasure in His words. 
 ^Vhat but a pure and sinless soul could have conceived such an idea of 
 God as the Father of mankind, drawing us to Himself by the attraction of 
 holy and exhaustless love ? " It could only rise," saj's Hausrath, " in a 
 spirit that stood pure, guiltless, and sinless before God — a spirit in which 
 all human unrest and disturbance were unknown, on which there lay no 
 sense of the littleness of life, no distracting feeling of disappointed am- 
 bition. Sinful man, with a stain or even uneasy conscience, will always 
 think of God as jealous, wrathful, and about to avenge Himself. The
 
 406 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 revelation that God is the Tather of meu could rise only in a mind in 
 which the image of God mirrored itself in calm completeness, because the 
 mirror had no specks to mar it. The revelation of G-od as tlie Father is 
 the strongest proof of the absolute perfection of the human nature in 
 Jesus." 
 
 " He has left us not only a life, but a rich world of thought," says Keim, 
 " in which all the best inspirations and longings of mankind meet and are 
 reflected. It is the expression of the purest and directest trutlis which 
 rise in the depths of the soul, and they are made common to all mankind 
 by being uttered in the simplest and most popular form." 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
 
 OPEN CONFLICT. 
 
 JESUS had now been some months in Galilee, and the season of the 
 great feasts had returned. It was meet that Judea, which had re- 
 jected Him when He first preached in it, should be once more visited, and 
 the news of the Kingdom once more sent abroad among the throngs 
 of pilgrims from every part of the world, attracted at such times to 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 Leaving the north, therefore, for a time, He again journeyed south ; 
 perhaps by short stages, preaching as He went ; perhaps with one of the 
 bands of pilgrims which gathered from each neighbourhood to go ujd to 
 " the House of the Lord." No voice would join with so rapt a devotion in 
 the joyful solemnities of such a journey, — in the psalms that enlivened the 
 way, — or the formal devotions of morning and evening. But what feast 
 it was He thus honoured is not told, nor are there means for deciding. 
 That of Purim, a montli before the Passover, the Passover itself, Pente- 
 cost, and the Feast of Tabernacles, have each found favour on plausible 
 grounds ; but where there is such contrariety of opinion, the safest course 
 is to leave the matter unsettled. 
 
 Of the visit we know only one incident, but it was the turning point in 
 the life of Our Lord. 
 
 Jerusalem in those days was a contrast, in its water supply, as in much 
 else, to the fallen glory of its present condition. Several natui^al springs 
 seem to have flowed in the city or near it, in ancient times, but they have 
 long been choked up, with the exception of the single " Fountain of the 
 Virgin," still found in the Kedron valley. Besides this, there is now only 
 a solitary well — that of Joab, at the junction of the Kedron and Hinnom 
 valleys, near Siloam, south-east from the town. It was doubtless used in 
 Christ's day, and it is still one of the principal sources of summer supply 
 for Jerusalem, though, like everything else under the withering spell of 
 Turkish rule, it is in such disrepair that its water, drawn from a depth of 
 125 feet, is tainted with sewage. The ancient supply, however, seems to 
 have been mainly obtained by collecting the rainwater in pools and 
 cisterns, and by aqueducts which drained distant hills, and brouglit
 
 OPEN CONFLICT. 407 
 
 abundance into the various public pools and reservoirs of the city and 
 Temple, the space beneath which -was honeycombed by immense rock-hewn 
 cisterns. Many houses, also, had cisterns, hewn in the rock, in the shape 
 of an inverted funnel, to collect the rain, but it was from the numerous 
 " pools " that the public supply was mainly derived. Eight still remain, 
 in more or less ruinous condition, and there appear to have been at least 
 three others, in ancient times. 
 
 One of the most famous of these, in Christ's day, was known as the 
 Pool of Bethesda, which recent explorations appear to have re-discovered | 
 at the north-west corner of the Temple enclosure. If the identification bo j 
 valid, the pool was a great reservoir, 165 feet in length, hewn in the lime- ! 
 stone rock to a breadth of 48 feet, and divided in halves by a pier of 
 masonry 5 feet thick, built across it. Water still enters it from the 
 north-west corner, probably from an abundant spring, though now so 
 mixed with sewage as to be unlit for drinking. Eusebius speaks of the 
 Bethesda of his day as "twin pools, one of which is filled by the rains of 
 the year, but the other has water tinged in an extraordinary way with 
 red." This effect was likely produced by the rapid influx of water 
 tln-ough underground channels, after heavy rains. It is said by St. John 
 to have been close to the " Sheep Gate "—the entrance, doubtless, of the 
 numerous flocks for the Temple market. 
 
 Bathing in mineral waters has, in all ages, been regarded as one of the 
 most potent aids to recovery from various diseases, and in the East, where 
 water is everything, this belief has always prevailed. The Pool of Beth- 
 esda, from whatever cause, was in especial favour for its curative jiowers, 
 which were supposed to be the most effective when the waters were '•' trou. 
 liled," either by the discoloration after heavy rains, or by periodical flow- I 
 ing after intermission, as is still the case with the Fountain of the Virgin, j 
 near Siloam. 
 
 Natural explanations of ordinary phenomena were unknown in those 
 simple times, for there was no such thing as science. Among the Jews, as 
 among other races, everything was attributed to the direct action of 
 supernatural beings. In the Book of Jubilees, which shows the popular 
 ideas of Christ's day, there are angels of adoration, of fire, wind, clouds, 
 hail, hoar frost, valleys, thunder, lightning, winter, spring, summer, and 
 autumn, and of "all things in the heavens and earth, and in all valleys; of 
 darkness, of light, of dawn, and of evening." The healing powers of the 
 Bethesda waters were, hence, ascribed to periodical visits of an angel, who 
 " troubled the water." Popular fancy had, indeed, created a complicated 
 legend to account for the wonder. At least as far back as the days of 
 Nchemiah, the ebbing and flowing of some springs had been ascribed to a 
 groat dragon v.'hich lived at their source, and drank up the waters when it 
 v»'oke, leaving them to flow only v^hile it was asleep. It was even said 
 that a good angel dwelt beside healing springs, and each morning gave 
 them their virtue afresh, and a Eabbi had gone so far as to report that, as 
 he sat by a fountain, the good angel who dwelt in it appeared to him, and 
 said that a demon was trying to get into it, to hurt those who frequented 
 it. He was, therefore, to go and tell the townsfolk to come with hammers,
 
 408 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 or iron rods or bars, and lieat the water till it grew red with thick drops 
 of blood— the sign that the demon was conquered and slain. 
 
 Some such fanciful notions, based, very probably, on real curative 
 powers in the water at certain seasons, attracted daily to Bethcsda a 
 multitude of unfortunates who hoped to be healed of blindness, atrophy, 
 lameness, and other infirmities, by loathing, at the right moment, a suffi- 
 cient nnnilx r of times. Charity had built five porches round the pool, to 
 afford the crowd a shelter, and these, and the great stops leading down to 
 the waters, were constantly thronged, like the steps of a sacred bathing- 
 place to-day, on the Ganges. 
 
 Among the sufferers was one who had been helplessly crippled by 
 rheumatism or paralysis for thirty-eight years, but still clung to the hope 
 that he would, one day, be healed. He had, apparently, caused himself to 
 be brought from a distance, for he had no friends on the spot, and hence 
 suffered the pain of many times seeing others, less helpless, crowd into 
 the waters, while he lay on his mat for want of some pitying aid. 
 
 Jesus had every motive, at this time, to avoid attracting attention in 
 Jerusalem, for it might rouse the open hostility of the Church authorities, 
 which only waited an opportunity. The pitiful plight of the sufferer, 
 however, awoke His compassion, and in sympathy for his story, though 
 without committing Himself to his ideas resjsecting the pool, He healed 
 him by a word, telling him to " rise, take up his sleeping mat, and walk." 
 
 The common feelings of humanity, one might have thought, would have 
 followed an act so tender and beautiful, with admiration and hearty 
 appi'oval. But there is no crime that may not be done by fanaticism 
 allied to religious opinions ; no deadness to true religion too profound for 
 the championship of fancied orthodoxy. Pity, charity, recognition of 
 worth, or nobleness of act or word, give place to remorseless hatred and 
 bloodthirsty vengeance where there is religious hatred. Inquisitors who 
 sent thousands to the stake for an abstract proposition, or immured theru 
 in dungeons, and feasted on their torture, for their refusal to repeat sora 
 wretched Shibboleth, have been amiable and gentle in all other relations. 
 The hierarchical party in Jerusalem comprised men of all dispositions, and 
 of every shade of sincerity and its opposite. But ib had been touched in 
 its tenderest susceptibilities by the preaching of the Baptist ; for it had 
 been called to account, and had had its shortcomings held up before the 
 nation. The instinct of self-preservation, and the conservatism of a 
 priestl^^ and legal order, were instantly roused, and assailed the Reformer 
 with the cry that the Law and the Temple were in danger. The Baptist 
 had already fallen, most likely by their help ; but a successor, more to be 
 dreaded, had risen in Jesus. They had watched His course in Galilee 
 with anxiety, which had already shown itself during His short visit to 
 Jerusalem at the Passover before, and in His subsequent circuits through 
 Judea. Spies, sent from Jerusalem, dogged His steps and noted His 
 words and acts, to report them duly to the ecclesiastical authorities, who 
 had seen more clearly, day by day, that a mortal struggle w^as inevitable 
 between the old theocracy and the Innovator. Everything was in their 
 favour. They were in power, and could at any moment bring Him before
 
 OPEN CONFLICT. 409 
 
 tlieir own courts on trial, even for life. But they dreaded overt hostility, 
 and for a time preferred to undermine Him secretly, by mooting among 
 the people suspicions of His being a heretic, or affecting to think Him a 
 mere crazed enthusiast. His most innocent sayings were perverted to 
 evil; His purest aims purposely misconstrue 1. Only the favour of the 
 multitude, and His own moderation, prudence, and wisdom, warded ofE 
 open violence. 
 
 He had now, however, given a pretext for more decided action than 
 they had yet taken. No feature of the Jewish system was so marked as 
 its extraordinary strictness in the outward observance of the Saljl)ath, as 
 a day of entire rest. The scribes had elaborated, from the command of 
 Moses, a vast array of prohibitions and injunctions, covering the Avhole 
 of social, individual, and piiblic life, and carried it to the extreme of ridi- 
 culous caricature. Lengthened rules were prescribed as to the kinds of 
 knots which might legally bo tied on Sabbath. The camel-driver's knct 
 and the sailor's were unlawful, and it was equally illegal to tie or to loose 
 them. A knot which could be untied with one hand might be undone. 
 A shoe or sandal, a woman's cap, a wine or oil-skin, or a flesh-pot might bo 
 tied. A pitcher at a spring might be tied to the body-sash, but not with 
 a cord. 
 
 It was forbidden to write two letters, either with the right hand or the 
 left, whether of the same size or of different sizes, or with different inks, 
 or in different languages, or with any pigment ; with ruddle, gum, vitriol, 
 or anything that can make marks ; or even to write two letters, one on 
 each side of a corner of two walls, or on two leaves of a writing-tablet, if 
 they could be read together, or to write them on the body. But they 
 might bo written on any dark fluid, on the sap of a fruit-tree, on road-dust, 
 on sand, or on anything in which the writing did not remain. If they 
 were wi'itten with the hand turned upside down, or with the foot, or the 
 mouth, or the elbow, or if one letter were added to another previously 
 made, or other letters traced ovei", or if a person designed to write the 
 letter H and only wrote two T t, or if he wrote one letter on the ground 
 and one on the wall, or on two walls, or on two pages of a book, so that 
 they could not be read together, it was not illegal. If a pei'son, through 
 forgetfulness, wrote two characters at different times, one in the morning, 
 the other perhaps towards evening, it was a question among the Kabbis 
 whether he had or had not broken the Sabbath. 
 
 The quantity of food that might be carried on Sabbath from one place to 
 another was duly settled. It must be less in bulk than a dried fig : if 
 of honey, only as much as would anoint a wound ; if water, as much as 
 would make eye-salve ; if paper, as much as would be put in a phylactery ; 
 if ink, as much as would form two letters. 
 
 To kindle or extinguish a fire on the Sabbath was a great desecration of 
 the day, nor was even sickness allowed to violate Eabbiuical rules. It 
 was forbidden to give an emetic on Sabbath, to set a broken bone, or put 
 back a dislocated joint, though some Kabbis, more liberal, held that what- 
 ever endangered life made the Sabbath law void, " for the commands 
 were given to Israel only that they might live by them." One who was 
 
 /> 
 
 1 \
 
 410 THE LIFE OF CUEIST. 
 
 Iniried uudev ruins on Sabbath, iiiiglit bo dug for and taken out, if alive, 
 but, if dead, lio was to be left wlicro he was, till the Sabbath was over. 
 
 The holy day began with sunset on Friday, and ended witli Iho suns<!t 
 of Saturday, but as the disa.p[)oaranec of tlio nun was tlie only mark of 
 time, its commencement was different on a hill-toiJ and in a valley. If it 
 were cloudy, the hens going to roost was the signal. The beginning and 
 close of the Sabbath were announced by trumpet blasts, in Jerusalem and 
 in the different towns. From the decline of the sun on Fi-iday, to its set- 
 ting, was Sabbath-eve, and no work wliiuh would continue into the lioiirs 
 of Sabbath, could be done in this interval. All food must bo prep<ared, iill 
 vessels washed, and all lights kindled, before sunset. Tlio money girdle 
 must betaken off, and all tools laid aside. " On Friday, before the bogiii- 
 ning of tlie Sabbath," said one law, "no one must go out of his houso with 
 a needle or a pen, lest ho forget to lay them aside before the Sabbath opens. 
 Every one must also search his pockets at that time, to see that tliere is 
 nothing left in them with which it is forbidden to go out on the Sabbath." 
 The refinements of Rabbinical casuistry v/ere, indeed, endless. To wear 
 one kind of sandals was carrying a burden, while to wear another kind 
 Avas not. One might carry a burden on his shoulder, but it must not lie 
 slung between two. It was unlawful to go out with wooden sandals or 
 shoes which had nails in the soles, or with a shoo and a sll2)i)cr, unhiss one 
 foot were hurt. It was unlawful for any one to carry a loaf on tlio public 
 street, but if two cai'ried it, it was not unlawful. The Sabbath was Ijclioved 
 to prevail in all its strictness, from eternity, tlu'oughout the universe. All 
 the Eabbinical precepts respecting it had been revealed to Jacob from the 
 originals on the tablets of heaven. Even in hell the lost had rest from 
 their torments on its sacred hours, and the waters of Bothesda might be 
 troubled on other days, but were still and unmoved on this. 
 
 In an insincere age such excessive strictness led to constant evasions by 
 Pharisees and Sadducees alike. To escape the restrictions wliieh limitiid a 
 journey on Sabljath to 2,000 culjits from a town or city, they eai'iied food 
 on Friday evening to a spot that distance beyond the walls, and assumed, 
 hy a fiction, that tliis made that spot also their dwelling. They could 
 thus, on the Sabbath, walk the full distance to it, and an equal distance 
 beyond it, this journey being only the legal distance fi'om tljo fictitious 
 place of residence ! To make it lawful to eat together on the Sabbath the 
 Eabbis put chiains across the two ends of a sti'eet in which the members 
 of a special fraternity lived, and called it a single dwelling, whih; to 
 excuse their carrying the materials of their Sabbath repast to the corrnr)f)n 
 hall, they each laid some food in it on Friday evening, to create tlie fiction 
 of its being part of the common dwelling. The priestly Sadducees, on the 
 other hand, made no scruple to have even the beasts destined for their 
 kitchen driven to their shambles on the Sabbath, on the pretext that tlflr 
 common meals were only a continuation of the Temple service, by which 
 the rest of the Sabbath was not legally broken. 
 
 Nor were such equivocations the only liberties taken with the sacred 
 day, for, however uncompromising tov/ards others, the Pharisees v/ero 
 themselves disposed to violate the Sabbath laws when occasion demande'd.
 
 OPEN CONFLTf'T. 1 I I 
 
 Tlioy luul ono iimxiin, tiinidly npplifd it, is Inic, Iml, slill llhii's: "'rim 
 Suhltalh is lor ^'oii, buT 3011 nic iioL for tlui Sal)liiilli ; " ami aiml luf, .st ill 
 bolder, " Mako a coniiudu day ol' yoiii- Salilialii raliici' limn j^o Id your 
 iici<^lil)our for bcli)." 
 
 Tlio priests and Jvabbis, Uiiis sccrclly iiidiilncnl, to I licmsclvi'S, bill, uiis- 
 tcrcly sLricL before tin! world, found iiii oppoi'l iiiiil y in I \\(' cwn^ ill, Hi'l liesiiii 
 for panidiiijj; llnir liollow ruiilanism, and al, IIk' .^aim' linn' iaisin<( 11 
 charge against, Jesus, for tlio man bad bicn bcalcd mi Iho Salibal li, and 
 had l)eeii told to carry his Hleeping-maL willi liini In bis JMinic. 'J'bis was 
 enough. Met in Iho street, cai'rying his ])al!el, by one of IIm'So purists, 
 ho had been i'ei)riniandi(l for doing so as contrary lo llic Law, and bad 
 sbii'ldrd himself Ity tlio ecjiiimand of ilini wiio liail ininiculoiisly healed 
 liim. It was not till some time aftei', uiieii Je.sii,; bad come upon bim in 
 tlio Temple, that lio know tho uanio of liia beiiofactoi*, for Jchuh iiad bm 1 ii d 
 away from tho pool, after eniiii'^' bim, to avoid exeillng lln' inidlllndo 
 round. 
 
 It seems from tbo caution given bim at tbis second meilin/.';, to " sin no 
 more, lest something worso should befall bim," as if the man bad bi<Higli() 
 liis infirmity on liimself by misconduct. Moi- did his suliseqnent bebiivioiir 
 do him much cix'dit. He had no sooner discovered Avlio liad iiealcd bim, 
 tlian be went to tbo oflit'ials and told them. i''rom tliat moment I bo doom 
 of Jesus was fixed. J'barisee and Sadducco, ltal)l)i and pric ;(,, foifil t iiig 
 their mutual hatreds, caballiMl, heiKwd'orth, to faHt;Cii such aeeiisationH upon 
 Ilim as would secure His death, and n(!V(!r bdtf.'red in llieir resolve till 
 they cari'ied it out, two years later, on Calvary. 
 
 Jesus seems forthwitii to bave bi'cn for tbe lirst timo citetl bol'ore tlio 
 antboi'ities, on the formal charge of Kabbal b-breaUiiig ; but liis jiidg(!N 
 were little prepared for tho tone of His defence, heft to answer for liim- 
 self, Ifo threw the assembly into a paroxysm of rcdigioiis fury by (tlaimitig 
 to work at all times for tho good (jf men, since it was only what (bid, His 
 Father, had done from tho beginning, notwithstanding the Kabbatli law. 
 As Ifis (Son, He was not to ];e b.ttered by that law, oi' Hiibject to it, bill; 
 was JiOrd of the Sabbath. The assernldy saw wliat tbis implied. lie 
 had added to His Sabbath desecration tbe higher crime of b!a:/pli( niou; ly 
 "making HiniH<;lf cfpial with (Jod by calling liim H|»ecially ilis l'"atlier." 
 The excitement must liave been gJ'eat, for (Jrientals give free vent to their 
 feelings, under any circumstances. Some years aiicr, tlio same iribuimJ, 
 with the crowd of spectators, gnaslied tlieir teeth at the martyr Sliplaii, 
 in their infuriated bigotry, and cried out v/itb loud v(iic<;s, and stopped 
 their ears at bis words. Jn all probability a similar i-.torm I'oso around 
 Jesus now. IJut He remained peif'eetly calm, and wlien sile/mo waH in a 
 measure restored, procc-cded with His defence against this second cliargo. 
 
 He did not for a moment deny that they were right in tin; meaning tliey 
 put on His words, l;ut stated more fully wliy Jl<; usr;*! tiiem. It wan 
 impossible for Him to act independently of liis I'atiier; lle(;ould only do 
 so if Ife were not His Son. 'i'liero was aiiHolutr; onr;nesH in the sfiirit and 
 aim of the works of both, as in tliose of a son who lool<s with reverenee at 
 the acts of a father, and has no thouglit Injt to reprt^duce tlieni, " My
 
 412 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Father, God, in His love for me, the Son, lays ever open before me in 
 direct self-disclosure, all that He Himself does, that I may do the same. 
 You marvel at my healing the lame man, but the Father "will show me 
 greater works than this, that I may repeat them here on earth, and that 
 you may wonder, not in curiosity as noAV, but in shame at your unbelief. 
 
 " Let me tell you," He continued, " what these greater works are. In 
 your Law it is the special prerogative of the Father to awaken and quicken 
 the dead, but it is mine also, for I, the Son, quicken whom I will. And as 
 to judging men here (as to their spiritual state), it is left to me alone by 
 my Father, that all men may. honour me as His representative, as they 
 honour Him. He who does not honour me, the Son, does not honour the 
 Father who sent me. If you wish to know whom I spiritually quicken, 
 they are those who hear my word, and believe Plim who sent me, for they 
 have cverlastiug life even here, and are not under condemnation, but have 
 passed from death to life. Verily, verily, I say unto you. The hour is 
 coming, and now is, when the (spiritually) dead will hear my voice — the 
 voice of the Son of God — and they that hear it shall live. I thus wake 
 them to life, because the Father has made me the Divine fountain of life, 
 as He Himself, the living God, is. He has also given me authority to 
 judge men, because I am the Son of man. 
 
 " But marvel not at wha,t I have said of waking and judging the spiri- 
 tually dead, for I will do yet greater works. I shall one day wake the 
 actually dead from their graves, and will judge them at the great day, 
 raising those that did good in this world to the resurrection of life, and 
 those tliat did evil to a resurrection of judgment. Nor is there a fear of 
 error, for I can do nothing of myself. I judge as I hear from God, who, 
 in His abiding communion with me, makes known His Divine judgment, 
 which, alone, I utter. Hence my judgment cannot err, because I speak 
 only that of God. 
 
 " You may say that I am bearing witness respecting myself, and that, 
 therefore, it is of no value ; but, if you think thus, there is another that 
 bears witness to me, and ye know that His testimony is true — I mean God 
 Himself. You sent to John, and he bore witness to the truth. But the 
 testimony I receive is not that of man. I only say these things that joix 
 may be saved, by taking John's testimony to heart, and being waked by it 
 to faith in me, and a share in the salvation which, as the Messiah, I offer 
 you. What a wondrous ap2:)earance John was ! He was a burning and 
 shining lamp, and you wished for a time to rejoice in his light ; but when 
 you foimd that he called you to repentance rather than to national glory 
 and worldly prosperitj^ you forsook him, and became his enemies. The 
 light he shed was not of the kind you desired. 
 
 " But I have a witness which is greater than that of John. The work 
 which the Father has given me to bring to completion — the work of found- 
 ing and raising the new kingdom of God, as His Messiah— this, in all that 
 it implies of outward and spiritual wonders, bears witness that the 
 Father has sent me. And not only does God Himself testify of me in- 
 directly by my work as His Messiah ; He does so directly, in your Scrip- 
 tures. But ye have not recognised the voice of this testimony, nor realized
 
 OPEN CONFLICT. 413 
 
 the image of me it presents. You are spiritually deaf to the one and blind 
 to the other. Ye have not the true sense of God's word in your con- 
 sciences, for you do not believe in His Messiah, whom He has sent, and of 
 whom these Scriptures testify. They witness to me as the mediator of 
 eternal life, and therefore every one who humbly studies them as the 
 guide to that life, will be pointed b}^ them to me. You search the Scrip- 
 tures, professing to wish to find life, and yet refuse to accejit me ! How 
 self-contradictory and self-condemning ! 
 
 " I do not reproach you thus, from ^any feeling of wounded pride, for I 
 care nothing for the applause of men. I do it because I know the ground 
 of 3"0ur disbelief — you have not the love of God in your hearts. If you 
 had, you would recognise and receive His Son whom He has sent. I have 
 come in my Father's name, as His commissioned representative — the true 
 Messiah — and you have rejected me with unbelieving contempt, but when 
 a false Messiah comes in his own name, you will receive him ! It is no 
 wonder you have rejected me, for how is it possible that such as jou could 
 believe, who have no higher craving than to give and accept empty 
 earthly honours, and are indifferent to the only true honour that comes 
 from being acknowledged and praised of God.'' 
 
 " You trust in Moses, who, you think, has promised you favour with 
 God, here and hereafter. Beware ! There is no need that I should accuse 
 you before my Father, for your unbelief in me. Moses, himself, in the 
 books in which ye trust, is your accuser, for if ye had believed his writings 
 ye would have believed me, for he wrote of me. But if ye be so blinded 
 as neither to see, nor to believe his writings, how will ye believe my 
 words ? " 
 
 The authorities had never had such a prisoner before them. They knew 
 not what] to do with Him, and, in their confusion and utter defeat, could 
 only let Him depart unharmed. They had not yet summoned courage to 
 proceed to open violence. 
 
 This was the turning point in the life of Jesus. Till now He had en- 
 joyed a measure of toleration and even of acceptance ; but, henceforth, all 
 was chanstcd. Jerusalem was no longer safe for Him, and even in Galilee 
 He was dogged by determined enmity. The shadow of the Cross darkened 
 His whole future career. 
 
 Free from His enemies, Jesus appears to have returned at once to 
 Galilee, in the hope, perhaps, that there — far from Jerusalem, with its 
 fierce religious fanaticism and malevolent hypocrisy — He could breathe 
 more freely in the still and clear air of the hills. But religious hatred is 
 beyond all others intense and persistent. There were Eabbis and priests 
 in the north as well as the south, and they watched His every step. 
 
 A fresh occasion for accusation could not be long of rising. He had left 
 Jerusalem immediately after the Passover, and on the Sabbath after the 
 second day of the Feast— or, it may be, a Sabbath later — a new charge 
 was brought against Him. In the short distance which it was lawful to 
 walk on a Sabbath — less than three-quarters of a mile — the path lay through 
 ripening fields of bai'ley — for Nisan, the Passover month, was the ancient 
 Abib, or month of caring, and the first early sheaf was offered on the
 
 414 THE LIFE OF CHlilST. 
 
 second day of tlie Passover, It was, by tlie Law aiid by Eastern custom, 
 free to all to pluck ears cuough in a corn field, or grapes enough from a 
 vine, to supply hunger, and the disciples, as every Oriental still does in the 
 same circumstances, availed themselves of this liberty, plucking some ears 
 of the barley, and rubbing them in their hands as they went on. The field 
 must have been near some town, most likely Capernaum, for a number of 
 people were about, and among others some spies. It was no wonder both 
 He and the disciples were hungry, for no Jew could break his fast till after 
 the morning service at the synagogue, or take supper till after the evening 
 service ; but He had sanctioned two offences against' the Sabbath laws. 
 The plucking' the ears was a kind of reaping, and the rubbing was a kind 
 of grinding or threshing. Besides, it was required that all food should be 
 prejoared on Friday, before sunset, and the rubbing was a preparation. On 
 any other day there would have been no cause of blame ; but to break the 
 Sabbath rather than suffer hunger for a few hours, was guilt worthy of 
 stoning. Was it not their boast that Jews were known over the world by 
 their readiness to die rather than brealc the holy day ? Every one had 
 stories of grand fidelity to it. The Jewish sailor had refused, even when 
 threatened with death, to touch the helm a moment after the sun had set 
 on Friday, though a storm was raging ; and had not thousands allowed 
 themselves to bo butchered rather than lift a weapon in self-defence on the 
 Sabbath ? The " new doctrine " of Jesus would turn the world upside 
 down if not stopped. ' 
 
 The spies of the hierarchical party, who had seen the offence, at once ac- 
 cused Him for permitting it, but His answer only made matters worse. Ho 
 reminded them how David, when pressed by hunger, in his flight from Saul, 
 had eaten the holy bread, and given it to his followers, though it was not 
 lawful for any but priests to eat it. Did that not show that the claims of 
 nature overrode those of a ceremonial rule ? that the necessity of David 
 and his followers was to be considered before the observance of a tradition ? 
 The law of nature came from God ; the theocratic prohibition was of man. 
 " And have yoxi not read in the Law," added He, " hoAV the priests work at 
 their duties on the Sabbath, and yet are held blameless, though they are 
 in fact breaking the holy day, if your traditions and rules are to be the 
 unbending standard ? What is lawful for the servants of the Temple to 
 do on Sal)bath must, much more, be lawful for my servants to do on that 
 day, for I am greater than the Temple. You condemn my disciples, be- 
 cause your thoughts are so fixed on outward rites tha,t you have forgotten 
 that God thinks less of them than of acts of mercy. Does He not say,, ' I 
 will have mercy and not sacrifice ' ? It is in your want of mercy that you 
 accuse my followers. They have, besides, acted under my authority. The 
 Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, as even the Pharisees 
 allow, and therefore, in any case, its laws must give way befoi'e human 
 necessities. But I, the Son of man — the representative of man as man — 
 the Messiah of God — am still higher than any individual man, and above 
 all your Sabbath laws." 
 
 Such a retort and such transcendent claims may well have startled His 
 accusers, but they only deepened their liatred, for bigotry is blind and
 
 OPEN CONFLICT. 415 
 
 deaf to reasou. Charge was being added to charge, accusatiou to accusa- 
 tion. He had claimed the jsower to forgive sins; He had associated vrith 
 publicans and sinners ; He had shown no zeal for washings or fasts, and 
 now He had, a second time, openly desecrated the Sabbath. 
 
 His defence had only made His position towards the Pharisaic laws 
 more antagonistic than ever, for it had denied that they were uncondi- 
 tionally binding. Their authority depended on circumstances : they were 
 not owned as directly Divine. God had planted a higher law in the human 
 breast, and the system of the Eabbis must yield before it. He had virtu- 
 ally alleged that the time was come to free Israel from the yoke of tra- 
 ditional observance, and to raise anew spuntnal kingdom on the imperish- 
 able basis of truly Divine law. By their system man was subordinated to 
 the Sabbath ; not the Sabbath to man. This harshness was not the design 
 or will of God. The Sabbath had been given by Him for the good of man, 
 and was to be a day of refreshment, peace, and joy; not of pain, sorrow, 
 and terror. Jesus, therefore, proclaimed expressly that man is greater 
 than the Sabbath, in du-ect contradiction to the Pharisaic teaching, which 
 made the Sabbath of immeasurably greater worth than man. Man, and 
 still more Himself, as the representative of humanity, in its abiding dig- 
 nity a,nd rights — the Son of man — is the Lord of the Sabbath. It was a 
 proclamation of spiritual freedom. 
 
 By such teaching, the Eabbinical and the priestly party, alike, felt 
 themselves threatened in their cherished hopes, wishes, and interests. 
 Since His half-contemptuous words about the old garment and the old 
 bottles, the breach between them and Jesus had been final. They had 
 marked Him definitely, as opposed to traditional Eabbinism, as a danger- 
 ous agitator, and an enemy of the venerated " Hedge of the Law," — the 
 glory of successive generations of Eabbis. The hierarchy would at once 
 have indicted him publicly, but for His wide popularity, the devotion felt 
 for Him by the multitudes He had healed or comforted, the transparent 
 singleness of His aims and labours, the gentleness aiad dignity of His 
 character, which enforced reverence, and His Divine humility and lowliness 
 of heart, which made Him so unassailable. 
 
 The synagogues were, as yet, open to Him, and He still frequented them 
 for the facilities they offered of teaching the people. Another violation 
 of the Pharisaic laws of the Sabbath soon followed in one of the services. 
 He had gone to the synagogue, and was teaching in it, Vi'hen He noticed 
 a man whose right hand, withered by long-standing local paralysis and 
 its consequent atrophy, hung helpless by his side. Meanwhile, the angry 
 scribes and Pharisees, now constantly on the watch against Him, sat with 
 keen eyes to see if He would venture to break their Sabbath laws once 
 more, by healing the sufferer, who could claim no help till the sacred day 
 was over, as he was in no immediate danger of life. Their fine-spun 
 casuistry had elaborated endless rules for the treatment of all maladies on 
 the sacred day. A person in health was not to take medicine on the 
 Sabbath. For the toothache, vinegar might bo put in the mouth, if it were 
 afterwards swallowed, but it must not be spat out again. A sore throat 
 must not be gargled with oil, but the oil might be swallowed. It was
 
 416 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 unlawful to rub the teeth with sweet spice for a cure, but, if it were done 
 to sweeten the breath, it was permitted. No fomentations, etc., could be 
 put to affected parts of the body. One prohibition I must give in Latin. 
 " Qui pediculum occidit sabb. idem est ac si occideret camelum." The 
 school of Shammai held it unhiwful to comfort the sick, or visit the 
 mourner on the Sabbath, but the school of Hillel permitted it. 
 
 It was clear, therefore, that, if any cure of the withered hand were 
 attempted, there would be ground for another fornaal charge of Sabbath- 
 breaking, which brought with it death by stoning. 
 
 But Jesus never feared to do right. No thought of self ever came 
 between Him and His witness to the truth. Looking over at His enemies, 
 as they sat on the chief seats. He read their hearts, and felt that fidelity 
 to the very law which His expected action would be held to have broken, 
 demanded that that act be done. 
 
 His whole soul was kindled with righteous anger and sorrow at the 
 hardness which forced conscience to be silent, rather than confess the 
 truth. It was needful that such hollowness and wilful perversity should 
 be exposed. As the Son of God — the Messiah — sent to found a kingdom 
 of i^ure spiritual religion. He felt that the wisdom of the schools, joriestly 
 mediation, sacrifices. Temple rites, and Sabbath laws, were only a 
 glittering veil, which shut out the knowledge of eternal truth, alike 
 towards God and towards man. He had taught and healed, announced the 
 kingdom of spirit and truth, cheered the poor, reproved sinners, lifted the 
 humble from the dust, and gathered the godly round Himself. Dull, 
 mechanical obedience to worthless forms ; or love, from the fulness of the 
 heart, was now the cpiestion, in religion and morals. Should true religion 
 be spread, or error confirmed ? Should He silently allow blinded men to 
 fancy their blind leaders right, or should He brave all, to open their eyes 
 and lead tlicm into the true ways of His Father ? Looking at the pai'alysed 
 man. He bade him rise from the floor — on which, with the rest of the con- 
 gregation, he had been sitting — and stand forth in the midst, and, on his 
 doing so, in ready obedience to one so famous, turned once more to the 
 scowling Eabbis on the dais. " Is it lawful on the Sabbath days," He 
 asked theiu, " to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it ? " But 
 they held their peace, fearing they might commit themselves by answer- 
 ing without careful reflection. " It is allowable, is it not," He resumed, 
 " to lay hold on a sheep which has fallen into a pit on the Sabbath day, 
 and help it out p How much then, is a man better than a sheep ? Where- 
 fore it is lawful to do well on the Sabbath." " Stretch forth thy hand," said 
 He, to the sufferer; — and the hand which, till then, had hung wasted and 
 lifeless at his side, was healthy and strong as the other. 
 
 Jesus knew the significance of the moment. He felt that the silence of 
 His accusers was not from conviction, but sullen obstinacy, which had shut 
 its ears against the truth. He saw that, between him and the leaders of 
 the nation, there was henceforth a hopeless separation. They had finally 
 rejected Him, and would henceforward seek His destruction. Their 
 fanaticism, now fairly roused, forgot all minor hatreds, and united the hos- 
 tile factions of the nation in common eagerness for His destruction. No
 
 OPEN CONFLICT. 417 
 
 parties could be more opposed than the nationalists or Pharisees, and the 
 Friends of Rome gathered round Herod Antipas at Tiberias, but they now 
 joined in hunting Jesus to the death. The alliance boded the greatest 
 danger, for it showed that, in addition to religious fanaticism. He had now 
 to encounter the suspicion of designing political revolution. The Church 
 and the State had banded together to put " the deceiver of the people " out 
 of the way as soon as possible. 
 
 It had been inevitable from the first that it should be so. The Jerusalem 
 party expected the " Salvation of Israel " from the unconditional restora- 
 tion of the theocracy, with themselves at its head, and from the strictest 
 enforcement of outward legal observances. While the contrast between 
 Judaism and heathenism was, meanwhile, intcusified and embittered to the 
 utmost, they hoped before long to crush Rome, or perish in the attempt. 
 They would have greeted any one who proved able to impose their Law, in 
 all its strictness, on mankind, — as a deliverer, as the stem from the root 
 of David, as the Saviour and Messiah. In Jesus, on the contrary, there 
 appeared one who, while constraining their wonder at His lofty morality 
 and spiritual greatness, was the very opposite of all they wished and 
 hoped. He claimed to be the Messiah, but His ideal of the Messiahship 
 was the antithesis of that of the Eabbis and priesthood. He had an- 
 nounced Himself as the founder of a new theocracy more spiritual and 
 more holy than that of Moses. He had thrown a new light on the Scrip- 
 tures ; had revealed God in a new aspect as no mere national deity, but 
 the Father of all mankind — and He had taught the most startling novelties 
 as to the freedom of the individual conscience. The Rabbis had enjoyed, 
 as their exclusive prerogative, the exposition of Scripture, but they now 
 found themselves dethroned by the religious freedom Jesus had proclaimed, 
 and He had even spoken of them as a hindrance to true knowledge. The 
 spirit of His teaching compromised the whole state of things in the 
 religious world. He announced a new future : the vested rights of the day 
 clung to the past, with which their interests and their passions were 
 identified. 
 
 The new wine was thus already bursting the old bottles, and the result 
 could not be doubtful. Conservatism felt itself imperilled, for it had been 
 Aveighed and found wanting. The priesthood had become a dividing wall 
 between God and Israel. Its condition was a fit expression of the reli- 
 gious decay of the nation. The sacrifices were mere outward forms ; the 
 Temple, notwithstanding the glory with which Herod's love of magnifi- 
 cence and hj^pocritical piety had adorned it, Avas a symbol of exclusiveness, 
 intolerance, and hatred of humanity at large ; the high officialism of the 
 day, was a dam against every reform, every breath of fresh religious 
 thought, and every attempt at a purer spiritual life. 
 
 z t
 
 418 TUB LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 OHAPTEE XXXIX. 
 
 gaAlee. 
 
 THE opposition of tlie Eabbis and priests, however malignant and fixed, 
 was as yet confined to secret plottings. Witli tlie people at large. 
 Jesus continued even increasingly popiilar. It was advisable, however, to 
 avoid any pretext for overt hostility, and hence He withdrew from Caper- 
 naum for a time, on another mission to the towns and villages on the edge 
 of the lake, till the storm, in a measure, blew over. To the chagrin of His 
 enemies, the multitudes attracted to see and hear Him were larger than 
 ever. The excitement was evidently spreading through all Palestine, for 
 numbers still continued to come from Jeriisalem and Idumea on the south, 
 from Perea and Decapolis and other parts on the east, and even from the 
 heathen district round Tyre and Sidon on the north. There were many 
 Jews settled in every part of the land, and the concourse was no doubt of 
 such almost exclusively. It was even found necessary that a boat should 
 attend Him, as He journeyed along the shore, that He might betake Him- 
 self to it when the throng grew oppressive. Miraculous cases in great 
 number increased the excitement, many who crowded round Him finding 
 relief by touching even His clothes, and unclean sj^irits falling down 
 before Him in voluntary confession of His being the Son of God. But 
 though His pity would not refuse to heal any who came, He still sought 
 to avoid the offence of too great notoriety, by requiring secrecy. His 
 gentle and unostentatious progress was in such vivid contrast to the noisy 
 and disputatious ways of the Rabbis, that St. Matthew saw in it a fulfil- 
 ment of the Messianic visions of Isaiah, for He did not strive, nor cry 
 alottd, nor was His voice heard in the streets, and in His tender gentleness 
 He ATOuld not break a bruised reed, or quench even the smoking flax. 
 
 The Gospels do not enable us, in the incidents recorded by them, to 
 follow any chronological sequence of these months of our Lord's ministry, 
 but it must have been about this time, perhajjs on His return to Cajier- 
 naum, from this mission, that we miist date one of the most interesting of 
 their narratives. He had scarcely reached home, after His circuit, when 
 a deputation of "the elders of the Jews" waited on Him. They were the 
 foremost men in the Capernaum community — the governing body of the 
 synagogue, and, as such, the Jewish magistrates of the town. It is the 
 habit in the East to send such embassies when any request is to be made 
 or invitation given with circumstances of special respect, but there was 
 a feature in this case that made it veiy unusual. The members of the 
 deputation, though Jewish ecclesiastical officials, came as the representa- 
 tives of a heathen, possibly of a Samaritan. Lying on the edge of his 
 territory, Herod Antipas kept a small garrison in Capernaum, and this, at 
 that time, was imder command of a centurion, who, like many of the better 
 heathen of the day, had been drawn towards Judaism by its favourable 
 contrast with idolatry. He had shown his sympathy with the nation and 
 his generous spirit, in a way then not uncommon among the wealthy, by 
 building a synagogue in the town — perhaps that of Avhich the massive
 
 GALILEE. 419 
 
 ruins still remain. One of his slaves liaci been sti'uck with a paralytic 
 affection, and was fast sinking ; and with a tenderness that did him infinite 
 honour in an age when a slave was treated by many masters, and even 
 in the eye of the Eoman laAv, as a mere chattel, he prayed Jesus, through 
 the Jewish elders, to heal the sufferer. Their request was at once complied 
 with, and Jesus forthwith set out with them to the centurion's quarters. 
 
 But the zeal of the messengers had outrun their commission, for, as 
 Jesus ap25roached the house, a second dej^utation met Him, to deprecate 
 His being put to so much trouble, and to apologise, by a humble expression 
 of the centurion's sense of his unworthiness of the honour of such an One 
 coming under his roof. He, himself, appears to have followed, as if it had 
 been too great a liberty to approach Jesus except at the distance of two 
 mediations. " Lord," said he, " trouble not Thyself ; for I am not worthy 
 that Thou shoiildcst enter under my roof. Wherefore, neither thought I 
 myself worthj^ to come to Thee ; but say in a word, and my servant shall 
 be healed. For I, also, am a man set under authority (and render obedi- 
 ence to my superiors), and have soldiers under me, and I say to this one, 
 Go, and he goes ; to another. Come, and he comes ; and to my servant, Do 
 this, and he does it. If, therefore. You indicate your pleasure only by a 
 word, the demons who cause diseases will at once obey You and leave the 
 sick man, for they are under your authority, as my servants are under 
 mine." 
 
 Faith so clear, undoubting, and humble, had never before cheered the 
 heart of Jesus, even from a Jew, and, coming as it did from the lips of a 
 heathen, it seemed the first-fruits of a vast harvest, outside the limits of 
 the Ancient People. He had found a welcome in Samaria when rejected 
 in Judea ; and now it was from a heathen He received this lowly homage. 
 The clouds that had lain over the world through the past seemed to break 
 away, and a new earth spread itself out before His soul. The Kingdom 
 of God, rejected by Israel, would be welcomed by the despised Gentile 
 nations. " Verily," said He, " I tell you, I have not found so great faith, 
 no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, that many shall come from the 
 east and the west, o.nd lie down at the table of God in the kingdom of the 
 Messiah, as honoured guests, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while the 
 Jew, who prided himself on being, by birth, the child of the heavenly 
 kingdom, and despised all others, as doomed to sit in the darkness outside 
 the banquet hall of the Messiah, will have to change places with them ! " 
 To His hearers such language would speak with a force to be measured 
 only by their fierce pride and intolerance. To share a grand banquet with 
 the patriarchs in the Messianic kingdom, was a favourite mode with the 
 Jews of picturing the blessedness that kingdom would bring. " In the 
 future world," they made God say, in one of their Rabbinical lessons, " I 
 shall spread for you Jews a great table, which the Gentiles will see and be 
 ashamed." But now the rejection and despair are to be theirs ! The con- 
 trast between Jesus and the Eabbis was daily becoming more marlajd, for 
 He adds to all else a grand vision of a universal religion, and of a kingdom 
 of the Messiah, no longer national, but sending a welcome to all humanity 
 who will submit to its laws.
 
 420 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 " Go thy way," added He, to the centurion, " and as thou hast beheved, 
 so be it done to thee." And his slave was healed in that very hour. 
 
 He had apparently left Capernaum the same day, for we find Him, on 
 the next, at a village called JSTain, twenty-five miles to the south-west, on 
 the northern slope of " Little Hermon," a clump of hills at the eastern 
 end of tlio great plain of Esdraelon. It was still the early and popular 
 time of His ministry, and crowds followed Him wherever He appeared. 
 Nain, which is now a poor and miserable hamlet, inhabited only by a few 
 fanatical Mahometans, may then have deserved its name, " the beautiful." 
 The only antiquities about it are some tombs hewn in the hills, seen, as 
 you approach, beside the road which winds up to the village. The 
 presence of the Prince of Life, with a throng of disciples and followers, 
 might well have banished thoughts of sadness, but shadows everywhere 
 lie side by side with the light. As He came near, another jarocession met 
 Him, descending from Nain, the dismal sounds rising from it, even at a 
 distance, telling too plainly what it was. Death had been busy under 
 those blue summer skies, and its prey was now being borne, amidst the 
 wail of the mourner, to its last resting-place. A colder heart than that of 
 Jesus would have been touched, for it was a case so sad that the whole 
 town had poured forth to show its sympathy with the broken heart that 
 followed next the bier. It was the funeral of a young man, the only son 
 of a widow, now left in that saddest of all positions to a Jew — to mourn 
 alone, in the desolated home in which he had died, doubtless, only a very 
 few hours before. Moved with the pity at all times an instinct with Him 
 Jesus could not let the train sweep on. It was not meet that death should 
 reap its triumph in His presence. Stejoping towards the poor mother, He 
 dried up the fountain of her tears by a soft appeal. " Weep not," said He, 
 and then — careless of the defilement which would have made a Rabbi jiass 
 as far as he could from the dead — moved to the bier. Touching it, those 
 who bore the body at once stood still. It was, no doubt, a mere open 
 frame, like that still used for such purposes in Palestine, " Young man," 
 said He, " I say unto thee, Ai-ise." It was enough. " He that was dead 
 sat up and began to speak. And He delivered him to his mother " 
 
 It was at Shuncm, now Solani, a village on the other side of the very 
 hill on which Nain stood, that Elisha had raised the only son of the lady 
 who had hospitably entertained him ; and the luxuriant plain of Jezreel, 
 stretching out beneath, had been the scene of the greatest events in the 
 life of Elijah, who had raised to life the son of the widow, in the Phenician 
 village of Sarei:)ta, on the far northern coast. No prouder sign of their 
 greatness as prophets had lingered in the mind of the nation than such 
 triumphs over the grave, and in no place could such associations have 
 been more rife than in the very scene of the life of both. At the sight of 
 the young man once more alive, the memory of Elijah and Elisha was on 
 every lip, and cries rose on all sides that a great prophet had again risen, 
 and that God had visited His people. Nor did the report confine itself to 
 these upland regions. It flew far and near, to Judea in the south, and 
 even to the remote Perca. 
 
 For now six months ; it may be, for more than a year, the Baptist— the
 
 GALILEE. 421 
 
 one man hitherto recognised, in those days, as a prophet — had hiin a 
 prisoner in the dungeons of Machaerus, in hourly expectation of a violent 
 death — a man, young in years, but -wasted Tvith his own fiery zeal, and 
 now by the shadows of his prison-house. Eut Antipas had not yet deter- 
 mined on his ultimate fate. Shielding him from the fury of Herodias, and 
 yet dreading to let him go free, he still suffered him, as Felix permitted 
 Paul long afterwards, at Cassarea, to receive visits from his disciples, 
 as if almost ashamed to confine one so blameless. The rumours of Cln-ist's 
 doings had thus, all along, reached the lofty castle where he lay, and 
 must have been the one great subject of his thought and conversation. 
 As a Jew, he had clung to Jewish ideas of the Messiah, expecting appar- 
 ently a national movement, which would establish a pure theocracy, under 
 Jesus. Why had He left him to languish in prison ? Why had He not 
 used His supernatural powers to advance the Kingdom of God.? 
 
 To solve such questions, which could not be repressed, two of his dis- 
 ciples were deputed to visit Jesus, and learn from Himself whether He 
 Avas, indeed, the Messiah, or whether the nation should still look for 
 another? From first to last, more thansi^ty claimants of the title were 
 to rise. John might well wonder if tHe past were not a dream, and Jesus 
 only a herald like himself. He had everything to depress him. A child 
 of the desert, accustomed to its wild freedom, he was now caged in a 
 dismal fortress, with no outlook except black lava-crags, and deep gorges, 
 yawning in seemingly bottomless depths. Burning with zeal, he found 
 himself set aside as if 'forsaken by God, or of no nse in His Kingdom. 
 Even the people appeared to have forgotten him, for their fickle applause 
 had begun to lessen, even before his imprisonment. His work seemed t«, 
 have been without results ; a momentary excitement which had already 
 died away. He could not hope for visits from Jesus, which would only 
 have given a second prisoner to Machaerus — " the Black Castle." 
 
 The reaction from the sense of boundless liberty in the desert and the 
 stir and enthusiasm of the great assemblies at the fords of the Jordan, to 
 the forced inaction and close walls of a prison, affected even the strong 
 and firm soul of the hero, as similar influences have affected the bravest 
 hearts since his day. Moses and Elijah had had their times of profound 
 despondency, and it was no wonder that a passing cloud threw its shadow 
 over the Baptist in his lonely dungeon. 
 
 The answer of Jesus was full of calm dignity. Isaiah, the special 
 favourite of John, had given the marks, ages before, by which the Messiah 
 should be known, and these Jesus proceeded at once to display to the dis- 
 ciples sent from Machaerus. Among the crowds around Him, there were 
 always many who had been attracted by the hope of a miraculous cure of 
 their diseases or infirmities, and these He forthwith summoned to His 
 presence, and healed. John would understand the significance of such an 
 answer, and it left undisturbed the delicacy which shrank from verbal 
 self-assertion. His acts, and the gracious words that accompanied them, 
 were left to speak for Him. It was enough that He should refer the 
 envoys to Isaiah, and to what they saw. " Go your way, and tell John 
 what you have seen and heard. The blind sec, the lame walk, the lepers
 
 422 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the 
 Gospel preached to them." " Tell him, moreover, that I know how ho is 
 tempted ; but let him comfort himself with the thought that he who holds 
 fast his faith in spite of all fiery trials, and does not reject the kingdom of 
 God because of its small beginnings, and gentle spirituality, so diil'ercnt 
 from the worldly poY»^er and glory expected, already has the blessings it is 
 
 sent to bring." 
 
 The messengers had hardly departed, when His full heart broke out into 
 a eulogy on John, tender, lofty, and fervent. "It was no weak and waver- 
 ing man," said He, " bending this way and that, like the tall waving reeds, 
 that ye went out in bands to the desert banks of the Jordan to see ! ISTo 
 soft and silken man, tricked out in splendid dress, and living on dainty 
 fare, like the glittering courtiers at Tiberias ! John was a proj^het of God 
 — aye, the last and the greatest of prophets, for he was sent as the herald 
 to prepare the way for me, the Messiah ! I tell you, among all that have 
 been born of women, a greater and more honoured than John the Baptist 
 has not risen ! " 
 
 Passing from this tender tribute, which Ho had already paid to His 
 great forerunner, even before the authorities at Jerusalem, He proceeded, 
 as was meet, to point out the greater privileges enjoyed by His hearers, than 
 even by one so famous. " He was great indeed in the surpassing dignity 
 of his office, as the herald of the Kingdom ; yet one far less, but still a 
 member of that Kingdom which is now set up among you, is greater in 
 the honour of his citizenship than he, for he stood outside. But he did a 
 mighty work ; he roused the land to a grand earnestness for the kingdom 
 of the Messiah, and they who were thus stirred by him, are those now 
 being received into it. The Prophets and the Law only prophesied of 
 my coming : John announced me as having come. Believe, he was the 
 Elias who was to appear." 
 
 To a Jewish audience, no honour could be so great as this, for Elijah 
 was the greatest of all the prophets. " Elijah appeared," says the son 
 of Sirach, " a jorophet like fire, and his words burned like a torch. He 
 brought down famine on Israel, and by his stormy zeal, he took it away. 
 Through the word of the Lord he shut up the heavens, and thrice brought 
 down fire from them. Oh ! how wert thou magnified, Elijah, by thy 
 mighty deeds, and who can boast that he is thine equal ! He raised the 
 dead to life, and brought them from the underworld by the word of the 
 Highest. He cast kings to destruction, and the noble from their seats. 
 He received j^ower to punish on Sinai, and judgments on Horeb. He 
 anointed kings to revenge guilt, and prophets to be his successors. He 
 was carried up in a flaming storm, in a chariot with horses of fire ; he is 
 appointed for the correction of times to come, to abate God's wrath before- 
 judgment be let loose, to turn the heart of the father to the sons, and to 
 restore the tribes of Jacob. It is well for those Avho shall behold thee ! " 
 All the majesty of the prophetic ofiice seemed incorporate in the Tishbite, 
 and yet this did not appear enough to Jesus to express the dignity of 
 John, for he was more than a prophet, and no greater had ever risen 
 among all the sons of men.
 
 GALILEE. 423 
 
 The message from John was only the utterance of the general feeling 
 which, by its want of spiritual elevation, questioned the Messiahship of 
 Jesus, because He had not realized the national idea of a Jewish hero-king, 
 at the head of a great revolt from Rome, destroying the heathen, and 
 establishing the theocracy by wonders like the dividing of the Red Sea, or 
 the thunderings of Sinai. It struck home to the heart of the Saviour, 
 that even His hei'ald should have no higher or worthier conception of the 
 true nature of the kingdom of God, — that even he, so near the light,^ 
 should have caught so little of its brightness. No wonder the people, as 
 a mass, rejected Him. How long had He taught in the towns of Galilee, 
 and yet how disproportionately small was the niimber He had really won, 
 in spite of the throngs who had pressed with eager curiosity and wonder 
 round Him, and the respect He had excited by His teachings ! His heart 
 was bowed with sorrow. He had come to His own, and His own did not 
 receive Him. Infinite love and pity for them filled His soul, for He was 
 Himself a son of Israel, and would fain have led His brethren into the 
 New Kingdom, as the first-fruits of the nations. But they refused to let 
 themselves be delivered from the spiritual and moral slavery under which 
 they had long sunk. The yoke of the Romans was not their greatest 
 misfortune. That of the dead letter and of frozen forms and formulii?, 
 which chilled every nobler aspiration, and shut up the heart against true 
 repentance and practical holiness, was a far greater calamity. Even their 
 highest ideal — the conception of the Messiah — had become a heated fan- 
 tastic dream of universal dominion, apart from religious reform. A 
 glimpse of other fields, which promised a richer harvest, had, however, 
 lifted His sjairit to consoling thoughts, for the heathen centurion had shown 
 the faith which was wanting in Israel. His homage had been like the 
 wave-offering before God of the first sheaf of the Gentile world ! Heathen- 
 ism might be sunk in error and sin, crime and lust, and all moral confusion 
 might reign widely in it ; there was more hope of repentance and a return 
 to a better life, from heathen indifference or guilt, than from Jewish 
 insane, self-righteous pride. 
 
 The crowd of despised common people and publicans, to whom Jesus 
 had addressed His eulogy of John, received it with delight, for they had 
 themselves been baptized by the now imprisoned prophet. There were 
 not wanting others, however, whom it greatly offended — the Pharisees 
 and Scribes present for no friendly purpose. With the instinct of mono- 
 poly, they condemned at once whatever had not come through the legiti- 
 mate channels of authorized teaching. They had gone out to John, but 
 with the foregone conclusion to hear, criticize, and reject him with super- 
 cilious contempt, as only fit for the vulgar. Though a priest's son, he 
 was virtually a layman, for he had not been duly ordained. He might 
 be good enough in his way, but he was not a Rabbi. He was almost guilty 
 of scliism, like Korali. He was not licensed by the authorities, and yet 
 preached, as, indeed, for that matter, was the case with Jesus Himself. A 
 thought of the bitter hostility John and He had met, rose in the Saviour's 
 mind at the sight of the Rabbis on the skirts of the crowd, and the sad- 
 ness and indignation of His heart broke out in stern denunciation. " To
 
 4'24 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Vv'liat shall I liken the men of this generation ? They are like childi-en in 
 the empty market-places, playing at marriages and mournings ; some mak- 
 ing music on the flute for the one, some acting like mourners for the other ; 
 but neither the cheerful jaiping, nor the sad beating on the breast, jileasing 
 the companion audience. John the Baptist came upholding the traditions 
 and customs of you Rabbis ; for he fasted, and paid attention to washings 
 and set prayers, and enjoined these on his disciples ; but you said he "was 
 too strict, and would have nothing to do with him, and that he spoke in 
 so strange a way because he had a devil. I came eating and drinking — 
 neither a Nazarite like John, nor requiring fasts like him ; nor avoiding 
 the table of all but the ceremonially i^ure, like the Pharisees ; and you 
 say I am too fond of eating and of wine, and still worse, am a friend of 
 the ijublicans and sinners you despise. But the true Divine Avisdom, whicli 
 both he and I have proclaimed, is justified by those who honour and follow 
 it, for they know its surpassing worth, though you treat it as folly ! The 
 Divine wisdom of both his and my coming as we have come, is vindicated 
 by all who humbly seek to be wise, and the folly of men is seen in their 
 fancied wisdom." 
 
 He would fain have led into the ways of peace all to whom He had 
 preached in His frequent journeys. But tender though He was, He was 
 also stern when stolid obduracy shut its eyes on the sacred light He had 
 brought to them. Most of His mighty works had been done, and most 
 of His no less mighty words had been spoken, in Chorazin, Bethsaida, and 
 Capernaum, the district which He had made His home. But they had led 
 to no general penitence. With a voice of unspeakable sadness, mingled 
 with holy wrath. He denounced such wilful perversity. " Woe unto thee, 
 Chorazin, woe unto thee, Bethsaida, for if the mighty works I have done in 
 you had been done even in Tyre and Sidon, the types of besotted heathen- 
 ism, they would have repented long ago, in sackcloth aiid ashes. But I 
 say unto you. It will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the Day of 
 Judgment than for you. And thou, Capernaum, exalted to heaven by my 
 dwelling and working in you, slialt be thrust down to Hades, at the Day 
 of Judgment ; for if the mighty works I have done in thee had been done 
 in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say unto you, It 
 will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom, in the Day of Judgment, 
 than for thee ! " 
 
 It would seem as if, at this point, some communication that pleased Him 
 had been made to Jesus. Perhaps His disciples had told Him of some 
 success obtained among the sim^jle crowds to whom they had preached 
 the New Kingdom. Whatever it was. He broke forth on hearing it into 
 thanksgiving : " I praise Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, that 
 Thou hast hid the things of Thy Kingdom from those who are thought, 
 and who think themselves, wise, and qualified to judge— the Rabbis, and 
 priests, and Pharisees— and hast revealed them to simple souls, unskilled 
 in the wisdom of the schools. I thank Thee that what is well-pleasing to 
 Thee has happened thus ! " The New Kingdom was not to rest on the 
 theology of the schoolmen of the day, or on official authority, or on the 
 sanction of a corrupt Church, or on the support of privileged classes, but
 
 GALILEE. 425 
 
 upon childlike faith and humble love. It was not to spread downvrards, 
 from among the powerful and influential, but to rise from amidst the weak 
 and ignoble, the poor and lowly, who would receive it in love and humility. 
 It -was to spread upwards by no artificial aids, but by the attractions of its 
 own heavenly worth alone. It was a vital condition of its nature that it 
 should, for it can only be received in sincerity, where its unaided spiritual 
 beauty wins the heart. 
 
 Amono' the "babes " were doubtless included the confessors to be won 
 from the world at large, and not from Israel alone, for the law of growth 
 from below, upwards, is that of religious movements in every age and 
 country. All reformations begin with the laity and with the obscure. Jesus 
 had nothing to hope, but everything to fear, from the privileged orders, 
 the learned guilds, the ecclesiastical authorities, and the officials of the 
 Church generally. It sounds startling to read of His thanking God that 
 these all-powerful classes showed neither sympathy for the New Kingdom 
 founded by Him, nor even the power of comprehending it, and that it was 
 left to the simple and childlike minds of the common people, in their free- 
 dom from prejudice, to embrace it with eagerness. It was because He 
 saw in the fact, the Divine law of all moral and religious progress. New 
 epochs in the spiritual history of the world always spring, like seeds, in 
 darkness and obscurity, and only show themselves when they have already 
 struck root in the soil. The moral and religious life finds an unnoticed 
 welcome in the mass of the people, when the higher ranks of lay, and even 
 of ecclesiastical society, are morally and spiritually effete, unfit to introduce 
 a reform, and bound by their interests to things as they are. 
 
 The overflowing fulness of heart, which had found utterance in prayer, 
 added a few sentences more, of undying interest and beauty. It might 
 be feared that, if old guides were forsaken, those who took Him for their 
 leader might find Him unequal to direct them aright. To dispel any such 
 apprehension He draws aside the veil from some of the awful mysteries of 
 His nature and His relation to the Eternal, in words which must have 
 strangely comforted the simple souls who heard them first, and which 
 still cany with them wondrous spiritual support, intensified by their awful 
 sublimity as the words of One, in outward seeming, a man like ourselves. 
 
 "All things concerning the New Kingdom are delivered unto me of my 
 Father— its founding, its establishment, its spread. I am, therefore, the 
 King and Leader of the new people of God— the head of the new Theo- 
 cracy, divinely commissioned to rule over it. All that I teach I have 
 received from my Father. I speak, in all things, the mind of God, and 
 thus you are for ever safe. No one but the Father, who has commissioned 
 and sent me forth— me, His Son— knows fully what I am, and what mea- 
 sure of gifts I have received as Messiah. Nor does any man know the Father, 
 in His counsels for the salvation of man, as I, His Son, do, and those to 
 whom I make Him known. I am the true Light, who alone can lighten 
 men, the one true Teacher, who cannot mislead. 
 
 " Come unto me, therefore, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden with 
 the burdens of rites and traditions of men, which your teachers lay on 
 you— you, who can find no deliverance from the misery of your souls by
 
 426 THE LIFE OF CHRIST 
 
 all tliese observances— and I will give your spirits rest. Cast off their 
 heavy yoke and take mine, and learn of me, for I am not hard and haughty 
 like your Eabbis, but meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest for 
 your souls. Tor the yoke I lay on you, the law I require you to honour, 
 is not like that which you have hitherto borne, but brings health to the 
 spirit, and my burden is light, for it is the law of love." 
 
 Language like this, briefly expanded, for greater clearness, demands 
 reverent thought. Who does not feel that such words could not fall from 
 the lips of a siuful man, but only from those of one whose nature and life 
 lay far above all human imperfection? Who, even of the highest or 
 wisest, or best, of human teachers, could invite all, without exception to 
 come to him, with the promise that he would give them true rest for their 
 souls ? And who, in doing so, could speak of it as a thing apparent to all 
 who heard him, that he was meek and lowly in heart ? Who would think 
 of claiming the stately dignity of sole representative of the Unseen God, 
 and who could speak of God as his Father, in the same way as Jesus ? 
 And who would dare to link Himself with tlie Eternal in a communion so 
 awful and an intor-rcvclation so absolute ? He makes us feci that, as we 
 listen, we are face to face with the Incarnate Divine. 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 DARKENING SHADOWS. — LIFE IN GALILEE. 
 
 r I THE rupture with the hierarchical party was not as yet so pronounced 
 -*- as to prevent a more or less friendly intercourse between Jesus and 
 some of its members. An incident connected with one happened about 
 this time. 
 
 A Pharisee of the name of Simon, who seems to have been in good 
 social position, had met with Jesus in some of the Galila^an towns, and 
 had been so attracted by Him, that he invited Him to His house, to eat 
 with him. This was a mark of high consideration from one of a party 
 so strict, for a Pharisee was as careful with whom he ate as a Brahmin. 
 Defilement was temporary loss of caste, and neutralized long-continued 
 effort to attain a higher grade of legal purity, and it lurked in a thousand 
 forms, behind the simplest acts of daily life and intercourse. To invite 
 one who was neither a Pharisee, nor a member of even the lowest grade 
 of legal guilds, was amazing liberality in a Jewish precisian. It would 
 seem as if, when Jesus accepted the invitation, the courtesy had already 
 excited timid fear of having gone too far, and had given place to a cold, 
 patronizing condescension, which fancied it had conferred, rather than 
 received, an honour by His presence. 
 
 In the earlier ages of the nation it had been the habit to sit on mats at 
 meals, with the feet crossed beneath the body, as at present in the East, 
 round a low table, now only about a foot in height. But the foreign custom 
 of reclining on cushions, long in use among the Persians, Greeks, and 
 Eomans, had been introduced into Palestine apparently as early as the
 
 DAEKENING SHADOWS. — LIFE IN GALILEE. 427 
 
 days of Amos, and had become general in those of Christ. Kaised divans 
 or table couches, provided with cushions and arranged on three sides of a 
 square, supijlied a rest for gaiests, and on these they lay on their left arm, 
 "with their feet at ease behind them, outside. The place of honour was at 
 the upper end of the right side, which had no one above it, while all below 
 could easily lean back on the bosom of the person immediately behind. 
 Hospitality, among the poor, was prefaced by various courtesies and atten- 
 tions to the guest, more or less peculiar to the nation. To enter a house 
 except with bare feet was much the same as our doing so without 
 removing the hat, and, therefore, all shoes and sandals were taken off and 
 left at the threshold. A kiss on the cheek, from the master of the house, 
 with the invocation " The Lord be with you," conveyed a formal welcome, 
 and was followed, when the guest took his place on the couch, by a servant 
 bringing water and washing the feet, to cool and refresh them, as well as 
 to remove the dust of the road and give ceremonial cleanness. The host 
 himself, or one of his servants, next anointed the head and beard of the 
 guests with fragrant oil, attention to the hair being a great point with 
 Orientals. Before and after eating, water was again brought to wash the 
 hands, as the requirements of legal purity demanded, and from the fact 
 that the food was taken by dipping the fingers, or a piece of bread, into a 
 common dish. " To wash the hands before a meal," says the Talmud, "is 
 a command ; to do so during eating is left matter of choice, but, to wash 
 them after it, is a duty." 
 
 With all Jews, but especially with scrupulous formalists like the Phari- 
 sees, religious observances formed a marked fea,ture in every entertain- 
 ment, however humble, and, as these were duly prescribed by the Eabbis, 
 we are able to picture a meal like that given to Jesus by Simon. 
 
 Houses in the East are far from enjoying the privacy we prize so 
 highly. Even at the present day, strangers pass in and out at pleasure, 
 to see the guests, and join in conversation with them and with the host. 
 Among those who did so in Simon's house, was one at whose presence in 
 his dwelling, under any circumstances, he must have been equally aston- 
 ished and disturbed. Silently gliding into the chamber, ^^erhaps to the 
 seat round the wall, came a woman, though women could not with 
 propriety make their appearance at such entertainments. She was, more- 
 over, unveiled, which, in itself, was contrary to recognised rules. In the 
 little town every one was known, and Simon saw, at the first glance, that 
 she was no other than one familiar to the community as a j^oor fallen 
 woman. She was evidently in distress, but he had no eyes or heart for 
 such a consideration. She had comjoromised his respectability, and his 
 frigid self-righteousness could think only of itself. To eat with publicans 
 or sinners was the sum of all evils to a Pharisee. It was the approach of 
 one under moral quarantine, whose very neighbourhood was disastrous, 
 and yet, here she was, in his own house. 
 
 A tenderer heart than his, however, knew the deeper aspects of her case, 
 and welcomed her ai^proach. She had listened to the words of Jesus, 
 perhaps to His invitation to the weary and heavy-laden to come to Plim 
 for rest, and was bowed down with penitent shame and contrition, which
 
 428 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 were tlie promise of a new and purer life. Lost, till now, to self-respect, 
 an outcast for whom no one cared, she had found in Him that there was a 
 friend of sinners, who beckoned even the most hopeless to take shelter by 
 His side. In Him and His words hope had returned, and in His respect 
 for her womanhood, though fallen, quickening self-respect had been once 
 more awakened in her bosom. She might yet be saved from her degra- 
 dation ; might yet retrace her steps from pollution and sorrow, to a pure 
 life and jDcace of mind. What could she do but seek the presence of One 
 who had won her back from ruin ? What could she do but express her 
 \owly gratitude for the sympathy He alone had shown ; the belief in the 
 possiljility of her restoration that had been revived in her heart ? 
 
 The object of her visit, however, was not long a mystery. Kneeling down 
 behind Jesus, she proceeded to anoint His feet with fragrant ointment, but 
 as she was about to do so, her tears fell on them so fast that she was fain 
 to wipe them with her long hair, which, in her distress, had escaped its 
 fastenings. To anoint the head was the usual course, but she would not 
 venture on such an honour, and would onl}^ make bold to anoint His feet. 
 Unmindful of her disorder, which Simon coldly noted as an additional shame, 
 she could think only of her benefactor. Weeiaing, and wiping away the 
 tears, and covering the feet with kisses, her heart gave itself vent till it was 
 calmed enough to let her anoint them, and, meanwhile, Jesus left her to 
 her lowly loving will. 
 
 The Pharisee was horrified. That a Rabbi should allow such a woman, 
 or, indeed, any woman, to approach hhn, was contrary to all the traditions, 
 but it was incredibly worse in one whom the people regarded as a prophet. 
 He would not speak aloud, but his looks showed his thoughts. " This 
 man, if He were a prophet, would have known what kind of woman this 
 is that touches Him, for she is a sinner." 
 
 Jesus saw what was passing in his mind, and tui-ning to him, requested 
 an answer to a question. " There was a certain creditor," said He, " who 
 had two debtors. The one owed him five hundred pence, the other fifty. 
 And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Tell 
 me, therefore, which of them will love him most?" Utterly nnconscious 
 of the bearing of these words on himself, the Pharisee readily answered, 
 that he supposed he to whom the creditor forgave most, would love him 
 most. 
 
 " Thovi hast rightly judged," replied Jesus. Then, like IsTathan with 
 David, He proceeded to bring the parable home to the conscience of His 
 host. 
 
 Turning to the weeping, penitent woman at His feet, and pointing to 
 her, He continued, " Simon, seest thou this woman? I entered into thine 
 house ; thou gavest me no water for my feet as even courtesy demanded ; 
 but she has washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with her hair. 
 Thou, gavest me no kiss ; but this woman, since the time I entered, has 
 not ceased to kiss my feet tenderly. Thou didst not anoint my head with 
 oil ; but she has anointed my feet with ointment. I say unto thee, there- 
 fore, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much ; but one 
 to whom little is forgiven, loves little." Then addressing the sobbing
 
 DARKENING SHADOWS. — LIFE IN GALILEE. 429 
 
 woman herself, He told her, " Thy sins are forgiven. Thy faith has saved 
 thee : go in peace ! " 
 
 That He should claim to forgive sins bad already raised a charge of 
 blasphemy against Him, and it did not pass unnoticed now. 13 ut the 
 time had not yet come for oj^en hostility, and His words, in the meanwhile, 
 were only treasixred up to be used against Him hereafter. 
 
 We are indebted to a notice in St. Luke for a glimpse of the mode of 
 life of Jesus in tbese months. He seems to have spent them in successive 
 circuits, from Capernaum as a centre, through all the towns and villages 
 of Galilee, very much as tbe Eabbis were accustomed to do over the coun- 
 try at large. In these journeys He was attended by the Twelve, and by 
 a group of loving women, attracted to Him by relationship, or by His 
 having healed them of various diseases ; who provided, in part at least, 
 for His wants, and those of His followers. That He Avas not absolutely 
 poor, in the sense of suffering from want, is implied in His recognition 
 as a Eabbi, and even as a prophet, which secured Him hospitality and 
 welcome, as an act of supreme religious merit, wherever He went. To 
 entertain a Eabbi was to secure the favour of God, and it was coveted 
 as a special honour. Thus, though he had no home He could call His 
 own. He would never want ready admission to the homes of others where- 
 ever He went, so long as popular prejudice was not excited against Him. 
 The cottage of Lazarus at Bethany was only one of many that opened its 
 doors to Him, and He could even reckon on a cheerful reception so con. 
 fidently, as to invite Himself to houses like that of Zaccheus, or that of 
 him in whose upper room He instituted the Last Supper. Many disciples, 
 or persons favourably inclined to Him, were scattered over the land. The 
 simplicity of Eastern life favoured such kindly relations, and hence His 
 wants would be freely supplied, except in desert parts, or when He was 
 journeying througli Samaria, or distant places on the frontiers of Galilee. 
 The willing gifts of friends, thrown into a common fund, supplied so fully 
 all that was needed in such cases, that there was always, indeed, a surplus 
 from which to give to the poor. 
 
 The names of some of the group of women who thus attended Jesus 
 have been handed down as a fitting tribute to their devotion, while those 
 of the men who followed Him, with the exception of the twelve Apostles, 
 are lost. The religious enthusiasm of the age, always seen most in the 
 gentler sex, had already sjiread among all Jewish women, for the Phari- 
 sees found them their most earnest supporters. It was only natui'al, 
 therefore, that Jesus should attract a similar devotion. His purity of soul. 
 His reverent courtesy to the sex. His championship of their equal dignity 
 with man, before God, and His demand for supreme zeal from both sexes, 
 in the spread of the ISTgav Kingdom, dve^v them after Him. But so accus- 
 tomed were all classes to such attendance on their own Eabbis, that even 
 the enemies of Jesus found no ground for censuring it in His case. 
 
 Of these earliest mothers of the Church, five are named. Mary, or 
 Miriam, of the town of Magdala, from whom Jesus had cast seven devils ; 
 Johanna, the wife, not the widow, of Chuza, a high ofiicial in the palace 
 of Herod Antipas at Tiberias; Susanna, of whom only the name is known ;
 
 430 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 Mary, the mother of James the Less and of Joscs, and wife of Clopas ; 
 and Schelamith, or Salome, mother of James and John, and wife of Zebcdco 
 or Zabdai, perhaps also the sister of Mary the mother of Jesus, as Mary 
 the Avife of Clopas is also thought by many to have been. Of this little 
 band, so slightly yet so endearingly mentioned, a surpassing interest at- 
 taches to Mary Magdalene, from her unfounded identification with the 
 fallen penitent who did Jesus honour in the house of the Pharisee Simon. 
 There is nothing whatever to connect her with that narrative, for to think 
 that she led a sinful life, from the fact of her having suffered from de- 
 moniacal 250sscssion, confounds what the New Testament distinguishes by 
 the clearest language. ISTever, perhaps, has a figment so utterly baseless 
 obtained so wide an acceptance, as that which we connect with her name. 
 But it is hopeless to try to explode it, for the word has passed into the 
 vocabulai-ies of Europe as a synonym of penitent frailty. 
 
 Mary appears to have belonged to the village of Magdala, or Migdol, 
 " the Tower," about three miles north of Tiberias, on the water's edge, at 
 the south-east corner of the plain of Gennesareth. It is now represented 
 by the few Avretched hovels which form the Mahometan village of El- 
 Mejdcl, with a solitary thorn-bush beside it, as the last trace of the rich 
 groves and orchards, amidst which it was, doubtless, embowered in the 
 days of our Lord. A high limestone rock, full of caves, overhangs it on 
 the south-west, and beneath this, out of a deep ravine at the back of the 
 plain, a clear stream rushes joast to the lake, which it enters through a 
 tangled thicket of thorn and willows and oleanders, covered in their season 
 with clouds of varied blossoms. "Who Mary was, or what, no one can 
 tell ; but legend, with a cruel injustice, has associated her name for ever 
 with the spot, now sacred to her, as the lost one reclaimed by Jesus. 
 
 The circle which thus attended Him on His journeys was peculiar, above 
 all things, in an age of intense ritualism, by its slight care for the external 
 observances and mortifications, which form the sum of religion with so 
 many. This simplicity was made the great accusation against Jesus, as, 
 in after times, the absence of sacrifices and temples led the heathen to 
 charge Christianity with atheism. Even the initiatory rite of baptism 
 had fallen into abeyance, and fasting and the established rules for prayer 
 and ceremonial purifications were so neglected, as to cause remark and 
 animadversion. There is, indeed, great reason for the belief of some, that 
 Jesus and His followers difi'ered, alike in dress, demeanour, mode of life, 
 and customs, from the teachers of the day and their followers. Tlio 
 simple tunic and ujoper garment may have had the Tallith worn by all 
 other Jews, but we may be certain that the tassels at its corners were in 
 contrast to the huge, ostentatious size affected by the Eabbis. Nor can 
 we imagine that either Jesus, or the Twelve, sanctioned by their use the 
 superstitious leathern phylacteries which others bound, with long fillets, 
 on their left arm and their forehead, at prayers. The countless rules, then 
 as now in force, for the length of the straps, for the size of the leather 
 cells to hold the prescribed texts —for their shape, manufacture, etc., and 
 even for the exact mode of winding the straps round the arm, or tying 
 them on the forehead — marked too strongly the cold, mechanical concep-
 
 DAEKENING SHADOWS. — LIFE IN GALILEE. 431 
 
 tions of prayer then prevailing, to let ns imagine tliat our Lord or the 
 disciples wore them. There was no such neglect of the person as many 
 of His contemporaries thought identical with holiness, for He did not de- 
 cline the anointing of His head or beard, or the washing of His feet, at 
 each resting-place. Iv'or did He require ascetic restrictions at table, for 
 Avc find Him permitting the use of wine, bread, and honey, and of fish, 
 flesh, and fowl. In Peter's hoiise He invited others to eat v."ith Him ; and 
 He readily accepted invitations, with all the customary refinements of the 
 kiss of salutation, and foot-washing, and anointing even with the costliest 
 perfume. The Pharisee atoned for his occasional entertainments by fast- j 
 ing on Mondays and Thursdays, but Jesus exposed Himself to the charge ' 
 of indulgence, because He never practised even such intermittent austeri- . 
 ties. Expense was, however, the exception and not the rule, for He praised 
 the Baptist for having nothing costly or effeminate in his dress, and He 
 enjoined the strictest moderation, both in appearaiice and living, on His 
 disciples. 
 
 It is the great characteristic of Jesus that He elevated the common 
 details of life to the loftiest uses, and ennobled even the familiar and 
 simple. In His company, the evening meal, when not forgotten in the 
 press of overwhelming labours, was an opportunity always gladly embraced 
 for informal instruction, not only to the Twelve, but to the many strangers 
 whom the easy manners of the East permitted to gather in the apartment. 
 After evening devotions, the family group invited the familiar and un- i 
 constrained exchange of thought, in which Jesus so much delighted. As j 
 the Father and Head of the circle, He would, doubtless, use the form of 
 thanks and blessing hallowed by the custom of His nation, opening the 
 meal by the bread and wine passed round to be tasted by each, after 
 acknowledgment of the bounty of God in His gifts. Then would follow 
 a word to all, in turn : the story of the day, and each one's share in it, 
 would be reviewed with tender blame, or praise, or counsel: and the faith, 
 and hope, and love of all would be refreshed by their very meeting round 
 the table. How dear these hours of quiet home life were to Jesus Himself, 
 is seen in the tenderness with which He saw His " children " in the group 
 they brought around Him, — as if they replaced in His heart the hovisehold 
 affections of the family ; and in the pain and almost v/omanly fondness, 
 with which He hesitated to pronounce His last farewell to thera. To the 
 disciples themselves, they grew to be an imperishable memory, which they 
 were fain, in compliance with their Master's wish, to perpetuate daily, in 
 their breaking of bread. His greatness and condescension, the loving 
 familiarity and fond endearments of close intercourse, the peace and quiet 
 after the strife of the day, the feeling of security mider His eye and care, 
 made these hours a recollection that grew bi'ightcr and more sacred Vv'ith 
 the lapse of years, and deepened the longing for His return, or for their 
 departure to be with Him. 
 
 In this delightful family life there was, hov/ever, nothing like com- J 
 miuiism, for there is not a trace of the property' of each being thrown into i 
 a common fund. His disciples had, indeed, left all ; but they had not sold • 
 it to help the general treasury. Some of them still retained funds of their
 
 432 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 own, and the women who accompanied them still kept their property. 
 When Jesus paid the Temple tax for Himself and Peter, He did not think 
 of doing so for all His disciples. It was left to them to pay for themselves. 
 The simple wants of each day were provided by free contributions, when 
 not proffered by hospitality, nor did He receive even these from His 
 disciples, though Eabbis were permitted to accept a honorarium from 
 their scholars. "Ye have received for nothing," said He, "give for 
 nothing." He took no gifts of money from the people, nor did He let His 
 disciples collect alms, as the Eabbis did their scholars. The only bounty 
 He accepted was the entertainment and shelter always ready for Him in 
 friendly Galilee. From the generous women who followed Him, He, in- 
 deed, accepted passing su]:)port, but, in contrast to the greed of the Eabbis 
 He only used their liberality for the need of the moment. His little circle 
 was never allowed to suffer want, but was always able to distribute 
 charity, and, though He seems to have carried no money. He expressly 
 distinguishes both Himself and His disciples from the poor. 
 
 His presence among His disciples was seldom' interrupted, even for a 
 brief interval. He might be summoned to heal some sick person, or 
 invited to some meal : or He might wish to be alone, for a time, in His 
 chamber or among the hills, while He prayed; but these Avere only 
 absences of a few hours. It would seem as if the kiss of salutation in 
 such cases greeted His return. He gave tlie word for setting out on a 
 journey, or for going by boat, and the disciples procured what was needed 
 by the way, if by land, and plied the oar, if on the lake. 
 
 He always travelled on foot, and was often thankful for a draught of 
 water, as He toiled along the hot sides of the white hills, or for a piece of 
 bread, procured in some village through which He passed. Sometimes 
 He went with His disciples, sometimes before them : leaving them to their 
 own conversation, but noting and reproving, at once, their misunderstand- 
 ings, or momentary misconceptions. 
 
 When a resting-place had to be found for the night. He was wont to 
 send on some of His disciples before, or He awaited an invitation on His 
 arrival ; His disciples sharing the friendly welcome, or distributing them- 
 selves in other houses. The entertainment must have varied in different 
 dwellings, from the simplicity of the prophet's chamber where the 
 Shunammite had provided a bed, a table, a stool, and a lamp, to the 
 friendship, and busy womanly ministrations, and homage of lowly disciple- 
 ship, of homes like the cottage of Bethany. Where He was received. He 
 entered with the invocation, " Peace be to this house " — but, unlike the 
 Pharisees, without asking any questions as to the Levitical cleanness of 
 the house, or its tables, or benches, or vessels. It was very rarely, one 
 would suppose, that He was not gladly enteitained, biit when at any time 
 He met inhospitality. He only went on to the next village. Sometimes 
 He bore His rejection silently, but at others, moved at the sjiirit evinced, 
 He shook the very dust of the town from His feet on leaving it, as a pro- 
 test. When meekness could be shown He showed it, but where circum- 
 stances demanded. He was as stern as commonly He was gentle. 
 
 It is not easy to realize the dailv life of one so different from ourselves
 
 DARKENING SHADOWS. — LIFE IN GALILEE. 433 
 
 as Jesus, but a delicately iioetical mind lias imagined the scene of tlie 
 healing of Mai-y Magdalene, and the appearance and acts of Christ so 
 finely, that I borrow some passages from His pen. 
 
 The landing-place at Capernaum was at the south side of the town. 
 Thither the boats came that brought over wood from the forests of 
 Gaulonitis, and thither the boat steered that bore Jesus, His four earliest 
 disci2:)les acting as boatmen. He had been on the other side of the lake, 
 and had returned now, in the evening. The sun was just setting, but a 
 few beams seemed to have lingered, to die away on His face, and the full 
 moon rose, from behind the brown hills still bathed in purple, as if to see 
 Him. The soft evening wind had risen to cool His brow, and the waters, 
 sjaarkling in the moonlight, heaved and sank round the boat, rocking it 
 gently. As it touched the shore there were few people about, but a boat 
 from Magdala lay near, with a sick person in it, whom it had taken her 
 mother's utmost strength to hold, and keep from uttering loud cries of 
 distress. She had been brought in the hope of finding Jesus, that He 
 might cure her. 
 
 "Master," said John, "there is work yonder for you already." "I must 
 always be doing the work of Him that sent me," replied Jesus ; " the night 
 Cometh when no man can work." The mother of the sick woman had 
 recognised Him at the first glance, for no one could mistake Him, and 
 forthwith cried out with a heart-rending voice, " O Jesus, our helper and 
 teacher. Thou Messenger of the All-Merciful, help my poor child, — for the 
 Holy One, blessed be His name, has heard my prayer that we should find 
 Thee, and Thou us." Peter forthwith, with the helj) of the other three, 
 who had let their oars rest idly on the water, turned the boat, so that it 
 lay alongside the one from Magdala. Jesus now rose ; the mother sank on 
 her knees ; but the sick woman tried with all her might to break away, 
 and to throw herself into the water, on the far side of the boat. The 
 steersman, however, and John, who had sprung over, held her Ijy the arms, 
 while her mother buried her face in the long plaited hair of her child. 
 Her tears had ceased to flow ; she was lost in silent prayer. " Where are 
 these people from ? " asked Jesus of the boatman, and added, to His dis- 
 ciples, when He heard that she came from Magdala, " Woe to this Magdala, 
 for it will become a ruin for its wickedness ! The rich gifts it sends to 
 Jerusalem will not help it, for, as the prophet says, ' They are bought with 
 the wages of uucleanness, and to that they will again return.' Turn her 
 face to me, that I may see her," added He. It was not easy to do this, for 
 the sick one held her face bent over towards the water, as far as possible. 
 John managed it, however, by kind words. " Mary," said he, for he had 
 asked her mother her name, " do you wish to be for ever under the power 
 of demons ? See, the Conqueror of demons is before thee ; look on Him, 
 that you may be healed. We are all praying for you, as Moses, peace be 
 to him, once prayed for his sister, — ' God, heal her.' Do not put our 
 prayer to shame ; now is the moment when you can make yourself and 
 your mother happy." These words told ; and no longer opposing strength 
 to strength, she allowed them to raise her head, and turn her face to Jesus. 
 But when she saw Him, her whole body was so violently convulsed, that
 
 434 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 the boat swayed to and fro, and she shrieked out the most piercing wails, 
 which sounded far over the lake. 
 
 Jesus, however, fixing His eyes on hers, kept them from turning away, 
 and as He gazed, His look seemed to enter her soul, and break the seven- 
 fold chain in which it lay bound. The poor raving creature now became 
 quiet, and did not need to be held ; her convulsions ceased, the contortions 
 of her features and the wildness of her eyes passed off, and profuse sweat 
 burst from her brow and mingled with her tears. Her mother stepped 
 back, and the healed one sank down on the sjDot where her mother had 
 been praying, and muttered, with subdued treinbling words, to Jesus, — 
 " O Lord, I am a great sinner ; is the door of repentance still open for 
 me ? " " Be comforted, my daughter," answered He, " God has no pleasure 
 in the death of the wicked ; thou hast been a habitation of evil spirits, 
 become now a temple of the living God." The mother, unable to restrain 
 herself, broke out — " Thanks to Thee, Thou Consolation of Israel," but He 
 went on, — " Eeturn now, quickly, to Magdala, and be calm, and give thanks 
 to God in silence." John stepped back into the boat to Jesus, and the 
 other boat shot out into the lake, on the way home. The two women sat 
 on the middle seat. Mary held her mother in her arms in grateful thanks, 
 and neither spoke, but both kept their eyes fixed on Jesus, till the shore, 
 jutting out westwards, hid Him from their sight. 
 
 When the boat with the women was gone, Peter bound his to the post 
 to which the other had been tied, but Jesus sat still in deep thought with- 
 out looking round, and the disciples remained motionless beside Him, for 
 reverence forbade them to ask Him to go ashore. Meanwhile, the people 
 of Capernaum, men, women, and children, streamed down in bands ; some 
 soldiers of the Roman-Herodian garrison, and some strange faces from 
 Perea, Decapolis, and Syria, among them. 
 
 The open space had filled, and now Peter ventured to whisper, in a low 
 voice which concealed his impatience, " Maranu we Eabbinu — Our Lord 
 and Master — the people have assembled and wait for Thee." On this 
 Jesus rose. Peter made a bridge from the boat to the shore with a plank, 
 hastening across to make it secure, and to open the way ; for the crowd 
 was very dense at the edge of the water. Christ now left the boat fol- 
 lowed by the three other disciples, and, when He had stepped ashore, said 
 to Peter, — " Schim'on Kefa " — for thus He addressed him Avhen He had 
 need of his faithful and zealous service in the thins-s of the kingdom of 
 God — " I shall take my stand under the palm-tree yonder." It was hard, 
 however, to make way through the crowd, for those who had set them- 
 selves nearest the water were mostly sick people, to whom the others, from 
 compassion, had given the front place. Indeed, Jesus had scarcely landed, 
 before cries for help rose, in different dialects, and in every form of appeal. 
 " Rabbi, Eabboni," " Holy One of the Most High ! " " Son of David ! ' 
 " Son of God ! " mingled one with the other. Jesus, however, waving them 
 back with His hand, said, " Let me pass ! to-night is not to be for the 
 healing of your bodily troubles, but that you may hear the word of life, 
 for the good of your souls." On hearing this they pi'essed towards Him 
 that they might at least touch Him. Wlien, at last, with the help of His
 
 DAEIiENING SHADOWS, — LIFE IN GALILEE. 435 
 
 disciples, He made His way to the palm, He motioned to tlie people to sit 
 down on tlie grass. The knoll from which the palm rose was only a slight 
 one, but when the crowd had arranged themselves in rows, it sufficed to 
 lift Him sufficiently above them. The men stood in the background, leav- 
 ing the front for the women and children. 
 
 It is a mistake to think of Jesus standing while He taught. He stood 
 in the synagogue at Nazareth while the Prophets were being read, but He 
 sat down to teach. He sat as He taught in the Temple, and when He ad- 
 dressed the multitude whom He had miraculously fed ; and when He spoke 
 from Simon Peter's boat. He did so sitting. 
 
 Under the palm lay a large stone, on which many had sat before, to 
 enjoy the view over the lake, or the shade of the branches above. The 
 Eabbis often chose such open air spots for their addresses. There Avas 
 nothing extraordinary, therefore, when Jesus sat down on it, and made it 
 His pulpit. His dress was clean and carefully chosen, but simple. On 
 His head, held in its place by a cord. He wore a white sudar, the ends of 
 which hung down His shoulders. Over His tunic, which reached to the 
 hands and feet, was a blue Tallith, with the prescribed tassels at the four 
 corners, but only as large as Moses required. It was so thrown over Him, 
 and so held together, that the grey red-striped under-garment was little 
 seen, and His feet, which had sandals, not shoes, were only noticed occa- 
 sionally, when He moved. When He had sat down and looked over the 
 people, they became stiller and stiller, till nothing was heard but the soft 
 plash of the ripple on the beach. 
 
 As Pie sat on the stone, Simon and Andrew, the sons of Jonas, stood on 
 His right and left hand, with James and John, the sons of Zaljdai. The 
 people stood around the slope, for as yet Rabbis were heard, standing. 
 " Sickness came into the world," says the Talmud, " when Rabban Gama- 
 liel died, and it became the rule to hear the Law sitting." " Sons of Israel, 
 men of Galilee," He began, " the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God 
 has come ; repent, and believe the Gospel. Moses, your Teacher, peace be 
 to him, has said — ' A prophet will the Lord your God raise unto you from 
 your brethren, like unto me. Him shall ye hear. But he who will not 
 hear this larophct shall die ! ' Amen, I say unto you : he who believes on 
 me has everlasting life. No man knows the Father but the Son, and no 
 man knows the Son biit the Father, and he to whom the Son reveals 
 Him." Then, with a louder voice. He continued, " Come to me, all ye 
 that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke 
 upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall 
 find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." 
 Then, drawing to a close, He added, "Take on you the yoke of the king- 
 dom of heaven, for the kingdom of heaven is the fulfilling of the Law and 
 the Prophets. Give up that which is worth little, that you may have 
 what is of great price. Become wise changers who value holy money 
 above all other, and the pearl of price above all. lie tliat has cars to hear, 
 let him hear,"
 
 436 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 CHAPTER XLI. 
 
 THE BURSTING OF THE STOKM. 
 
 THE summer passed in a succession of excitements and an unbroken 
 recurrence of exhausting toil. Wherever Jesus appeared He "vvas 
 surroimded by crowds, anxious to see and to hear. The sick everywhere 
 pressed in His way, and friends brought the bed-ridden and helpless to 
 Him, from all quarters. From early morning till night, day by day, with- 
 out respite, there was a strain on mind, heart, and body, alike. Even the 
 retirement of the house in which He might be resting, could not save Him 
 from intruding crowds, and time or free space for meals was hardly to be 
 had. Such tension of His whole nature must have told on Him, and must 
 have affected His whole nervous and physical system. To be continually 
 surrounded by misery in every form, is itself distressing; but, in addition 
 to this, to be kept on the strain by the higher spiritual excitement of a 
 great religious crisis and to be overtaxed in mere physical demands, could 
 not fail to show results, in careworn features, feverishness of the brain, 
 and the need of temporary quiet and rest. Yet sympathy was felt for Him 
 only by a few. The thoughtless crowds did not realize that they were 
 consuming in the fires of its own devotion, the nature they intended to 
 honour, and His enemies, seeing everything only through the disturb- 
 ing light of their hatred, invented a theory for it all that was sinister 
 enough. 
 
 The continued and increasing support Jesus received from the people, 
 was a daily growing evil, in the eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities. 
 They were in danger of losing their influence, which they identified with 
 the interests of orthodoxy, and national favour with God. They had let 
 Him gather four or five disciples, without feeling alarmed, for a move- 
 ment as yet so insignificant was almost beneath their notice. The choice 
 of a publican as one of this handful had, indeed, apparently neutralized 
 any possible danger, by the shock it gave to public feeling. The further 
 selection of the Twelve was, however, more serious. It seemed like con- 
 solidation, and progress towards open schism. There were, already, parties 
 in Judaism, but there were no sects, for all were alike fanatically loyal to 
 the Law, the Temple, and the scribes, and ready to unite against any one 
 who did not identify himself with them, in every sense. Criticism was 
 utterly proscribed : blind worship of things as they were was iiuperatively 
 required, and hence, Jesus, with His free examination of received opinions, 
 provoked the bitterest hostility. As long, however, as He had no fol- 
 lowing He was little dreaded, but signs of organization and permanence, 
 such as the choice of the Twelve, and the growing enthusiasm of the 
 people towards Him, determined the authorities on vigorous action. 
 Information was laid against Him at Jerusalem, where He had already 
 been challenged, and Eabbis were sent down to investigate the whole 
 question. 
 
 Every movement which did not rise in the Rabbinical schools was 
 suspected by the Rabbis and their disciples, and there Avere circumstances
 
 THE BURSTING OF THE STORM. 437 
 
 hi that of Jesus, which were especially formidable. The superhuman 
 powers He displayed could not be questioned, and the Rabbis could boast 
 of nothing as imposing. They were falling into the shade. Eespect for 
 Jesus was growing among the people, in spite of them. His claims were 
 daily urged more frankly, and the masses were disposed to assent to 
 them. On His return to Capernaum He had cured a man who was blind, 
 dumb, and mad, and possessed, besides, with a devil; and so astounding a 
 miracle had raised the question, far and wide, whether, in spite of their 
 former ideas. He were not the Son of David — the Messiah, after all. ]Mcn 
 had, indeed, expected an outward political kingdom, with ablaze of miracle 
 wrought on behalf of the nation at large, but they began to ask each other, 
 " When the Christ cometh will He do more miracles than this man has 
 done?" It could not be endured. The movement of John had just been 
 crushed, and now, in restless Galilee, one far more dangerous to the Jeru- 
 salem dignitaries was rapidly taking shape and consistence. It must be 
 put down at any cost. 
 
 The Rabbis from the capital, reverend and grey, did not know whether 
 to be more bitter at the discredit thrown on their own claims to super- 
 natural powers, or at the popular favour shown to Jesus. He cast out 
 devils, indeed, but so did they, and their disciples, the exorcists. It was 
 enough for Him, however, to speak, and the sufferer was cured of all 
 ailments alike, while they used adjurations, spells, and magic formulsB, 
 Avhich were dangerously like the superstitions of the despised heathen. 
 They laid stress on their knowledge of the secret names of God and the 
 angels. To utter the cipher which stood for these, was, in their belief, 
 to set in motion the Divine and angelic powers themselves, and a whole 
 science of the black art had been invented, defining how and for what ends 
 they could be pressed into the service of their invoker, like the genii of 
 the Arabian Nights into that of a magician. 
 
 The calm dignity and simplicity of Jesus, contrasted with their doubtful 
 rites, was, indeed, humiliating to them. The mightiest of all agencies at 
 their command was the unutterable name of " Jehovah " — called in the 
 Book of Enoch, in the jargon of the Rabbinical exorcists— the oath Akal 
 and " the number of Kesbeel." By this number, or oath, it was held, all 
 that is has its being. It had also a secret magical power. It was made 
 known to men by the wicked angels — "the sons of God" — who allied 
 themselves with women, and brought on the flood. " It was revealed by 
 the Head of the Oath to the holy ones who dwell above in majesty ; and 
 his name is Beqa. And He said to the holy Michael that He should reveal 
 to them that seci-et name, that they might see it, and that they might use 
 it for an oath, that they Avho reveal to the sons of men all that is hidden, 
 may shrink away before that name and that oath. And this is the power 
 of that oath, and these are its secret works, and these things were estab- 
 lished by the swearing of it. The heaven was hung up for ever and ever 
 (by it), before the world was created. By it the earth was foimded above 
 the water, and the fair streams come by it for the use of the living, from 
 the hidden places of the hills, from the foundation of the earth, for ever. 
 And by that oath was the sea made, and underneath it He spread the sand,
 
 438 THE LIFE OF CHIIIST. 
 
 to restrain it in the time of its rage, and it dare not overstep this bound 
 from the creation of the world to eternity. And through that oath tho 
 abysses are confirmed, and stand, and move not from their i:)Lace, from 
 eternity to eternity. And through that oath the sun and the moon fulfil 
 their course, and turn not aside from the path assigi\ed them, for ever and 
 ever. And through that oath the stars fulfil their course, and He calls 
 their names, and they answer, from eternity to eternity. And even so the 
 spirits of the waters, of the winds, of all airs, and their ways, according 
 to all the combinations of the sj^irits. And by that oath are the treasuries 
 of the voice of the thunder and of the brightness of the lightning main- 
 tained, and the treasui-ies of the rain, and of the hoar frost, and of the 
 clouds, and of the rain, and of the dew. And over them all this oath is 
 mighty." 
 
 Possessing spells so mighty as they believed the secret names of the 
 higher jDowers thus to be, the Eabbis had created a vast science of magic, 
 as fantastic as that of mediaeval superstition, to bring these awful powers 
 to bear on the mysteries of the future, and the diseases and troubles of tho 
 present. Combinations of numbers of lines, or of letters based on thcni) 
 were believed to i:)ut these powers at the service of the seer, or the exorcist- 
 Eesistless talismans, protecting amulets, frightful curses, by which miracles 
 could be wrought, the sick healed, and demons put to flight, were thus 
 formed. Armed with a mystic text from the opening -of Genesis, or the 
 visions of Ezekiel, or the secret name of God, or of some of the angels, or 
 with secret mysterious unions of letters, the Eabbis who dealt in the dark 
 arts had the power to draw the moon from heaven, or to open the abysses 
 of the earth ! The uninitiated saw only unmeaning signs in their most 
 awful formula), but he who could reckon their mystic value aright was 
 master of angelic or even Divine attributes. 
 
 The appearance of Jesus as a miraclc-AVorker so different from them- 
 selves, must have excited the Rabbinical schools greatly. They made no 
 little gain from their exorcisms, and now they were in danger of being 
 wholly discredited. At a loss what to do, they determined to slander what 
 they could not deny, and attribute the miracles of Jesus to a league with 
 the devil. They had indeed, for some time back been whispering this 
 insinuation about, to poison the minds of the people against Him, as an 
 emissary of Satan, and thus, necessarily, a disguised enemy of Israel, and 
 of man. It would raise superstitious terror, if they could brand Him as a 
 mere instrument of the kingdom of darkness. 
 
 The cure of a man, blind, dumb, and possessed, was so astounding, that 
 the Eabbis ventured to spread their malignant slanders more widely than 
 heretofore. Jesus had retired to Peter's house, wearied and faint, after 
 the miracle, but the multitude were so greatly excited that they crowded 
 into the room, till He could not even eat, and among them the Jerusalem 
 scribes, in their bitterness against Him, took care to find a place. He read 
 their faces, and knew their words. " This fellow, uuauthorized and un- 
 educated as He is, casts out devils through Beelzebub their prince." They 
 believed that the world of evil spirits, like that of the angels, formed a 
 great army, in various divisions, each with its head and subordinates, its
 
 THE BDESTING OF THE STOEM. 439 
 
 rank and file; the whole undei' the command of Satan. Beelzebub — the 
 " filth god," — was the name given by Jewish wit and contempt to Beelze- 
 bul,— " the lord of the (royal) habitation " — a god of the Phcnicians. To 
 him was assigned the control of that division which inflicted disease of all 
 kinds on man, and Jesus, they hinted, was playing a part under him, in 
 pretending to drive out devils from the sick, that He might win the people 
 to listen to His pestiferous teaching. They would not admit that His 
 power was Divine, and the ideas of the times necessarily assumed that it 
 must be the opposite. It was of no avail that light streamed in on them ; 
 for bigotry, like the pupil of the eye, contracts in proportion to the out- 
 ward brightness. He was, with them, an emissary and champion of the 
 kingdom of the devil, and an enemy of God. 
 
 They even went further. Not only was He in league with the devil ; 
 He Himself was possessed with an unclean spirit, and the demon in Him 
 had turned His brain : " He had a devil, and was mad." They had spread 
 this far and wide, and yet ventured now into His presence. 
 
 Jesus at once challenged them for their slanders, and brought them, in 
 the presence of the multitude, to an account. " His whole life was before 
 the world. The aim and spirit of it were transparent. Wa,3 it not ex- 
 pressly to fight against the evil and confused spirit of the day ; to over- 
 throw all wickedness and all evil ; to restore moral and spiritual soundness 
 in the people ; did iHe not strive after all this, with the fulness of His 
 power ? Who could deny that He only sought good, and spent all His 
 energy to advance it ? And could He league Himself with the prince of 
 darkness to do good ? What a ridiculous, sclf-contradictoiy charge ! To 
 think of Him overcoming evil by evil, fighting against the kingdom of 
 darkness, with the weapons of darkness, was almost too foolish to repeat ! 
 No kingdom is willingly in conflict with itself, for if there be division in 
 it, already it is in process of dissolution, since nothing more is needed to 
 bring it quickly to ruin." Thei'e was no answering such an argument. 
 But Jesus had still more to say. 
 
 " If I," said He, " cast out devils by the power of Beelzebub, by whom 
 do your disciples cast them out ? You do not attribute their works to the 
 I^rince of devils, why speak of mine as from him ? But if I do these 
 things by the power of God, I prove mj^self to be sent from Him, and to 
 be His Messiah, and where the Messiah is, there is His kingdom. Do you 
 still hesitate to draw this conclusion ? Ask yourselves, then, how I can 
 invade the kingdom of Satan, and take from his servants, instruments, 
 and victims — the sick, and the possessed — without having first overcome 
 himself ? The strong man's joalace can only be spoiled when he, himself, 
 is first bound. It is no light matter to put yourselves in the position you 
 take towards me. He who is not with me, is, as may be seen in your case^ 
 my enemy. No neutrality between the Messiah and the devil is possible. 
 If you do not help, with me, to gather in the harvest, you scatter it, and 
 hinder its being gathered ! " 
 
 The arguments of Jesus were so irresistible that the Kabbis, taken in 
 the snares they had set for Him, could say nothing, and now, while they 
 were silenced before the people they had striven to pervert, He advanced
 
 440 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 from defence to attack. They claimed to be the righteous of the land, T)Ut 
 had no idea of what true righteousness meant. Jesus had come to offer 
 forgiveness to sinners, not to judge them. He desired rather to deliver 
 them from their guilt. But He saw that His enemies, the theologians and 
 clergy of the day, and the privileged classes generally, had determined 
 to reject Him, whatever proofs of His Divine mission He might advance. 
 Their prejudices and self-interest had blinded them till their religious 
 faculty was destroyed. They had deliberately refused to be convinced, and 
 conscience grows dead if its convictions are slighted. The heart becomes 
 incapable of seeing the truth against which it has closed itself. They 
 dared to denounce as a spirit of evil the Holy Spirit of God, who inspired 
 the New Kingdom, and in whose fulness Jesus wrestled against selfishness 
 and ambition, soothed the woes of the people, opened a pure and heavenly 
 future, and sought to win men to eternal life. Light was to them dark- 
 ness, and darkness light. They even sought to quench the light in its 
 source by plotting against His life. This he told them, was blasphemy 
 against the Divine Spirit. They had wilfully rejected the clear revelation 
 of His presence and power, and had shown deliberate and conscious enmity 
 against Him. " This awful sin," said He, " cannot be forgiven, because 
 when it occurs, the religious faculty has been voluntarily destroyed, and 
 wilful, declared opposition to heavenly truth has possessed the soul as 
 with a devil." " To speak against me as a man," He continued, " and not 
 recognise me as the Messiah, is not a hopeless sin, for better knowledge, a 
 change of heart and faith, may come, and I may be acknowledged. But it 
 is different when the truth itself is blasphemed ; when the Holy Spirit by 
 whom alone the heart can be changed, is contemned as evil. The soul 
 has then shut out the light, and has chosen darkness as its portion. 
 
 " I warn you to beware of speaking thus any longer. Either decide tliat 
 the tree is good and its fruit consequently good, or that it is bad and its 
 fruit bad, but do not act so foolishly as you have done in your judgment 
 on me, by calling the tree bad — that is, calling me a tool of the devil, and 
 yet ascribing good fruit to me — such, I mean, as the casting out devils. 
 Do not think what you say is mere words, for words rise from the heart, as 
 if from the root of the man : as the tree and the stem, such is the fruit. 
 See that you do your duty by yourselves, that the tree of your own 
 spiritual being be good and bear good fruit. The tree is known by its 
 fruits. It is no wonder you blaspheme as you have done ; a generation of 
 vipers, your hearts are evil, and you are morally incaj)able of acknowledg- 
 ing the truth, for the lips speak as the heart feels. Witness to the truth 
 flows from the lips of the good ; such language as yours, from the lips of 
 the evil. But, beware ; for I tell you that, as such words are the utter- 
 ance of the heart, and show how you are affected towards God and His 
 Spirit, you Avill have to give account of them wdien I come as the Messiah, 
 to judgment. Your words respecting me and my Kingdom will then 
 justify or condemn you." 
 
 At this point, as was common in the most solemn Jewish assemblies, He 
 was interrupted by some of the Rabbis present. They demanded, in 
 strange contradiction to the theory that He was a secret agent of Beel«
 
 THE BURSTING OF THE STORM. 441 
 
 zebub, some a.siouudiug minicle, as a sign i'roiu heaven in support of his 
 claims as the Messiah : as hereafter they did, in every part of the world, 
 from the Apostles. The masses, and even their leaders, expected the 
 repetition of all the great deeds of Moses and Joshua, to inaugurate the 
 coming of the Messiah, and other claimants did not venture to resist 
 the demand. Under the Procurator Fadus, a certain Thendas drew out 
 the people to the Jordan to see Israel walk through, once more, on dry 
 ground. Under Felix, a prophet promised to throw down the walls of 
 Jerusalem, as Joshiia did those of Jericho, and gathered thirty thousand 
 men on the Mount of Olives to see them fall. Others invited the nation 
 to follow them into the wilderness, where they promised to show them 
 stupendous signs of the kingdom of God having come. It might have 
 seemed a temptation to One possessing supernatural jiower, to silence all 
 cavil by a miracle of irresistible grandeur. But outward acknowledg- 
 ment of His claims was of no worth in a kingdom like that of Christ, 
 resting on love, and homage to holiness. He cared nothing for popularity 
 or fame, and lived in unbroken self-restraint, using His mighty power only 
 to further spiritual ends. It was easy, therefore, to repel the seduction, 
 which He had already overcome in His first great wilderness struggle. 
 " An evil and adulterous generation," said He — " unfaithful to God, who 
 chose Israel for His bride — asks for a sign, grand beyond all I have given, 
 that I am the Messiah." Then, predicting His violent death. He went on 
 • — " There shall be no sign given it, but that of the prophet Jonah. For, 
 as he was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, so shall the 
 Son of man be three days and three nights in the kingdom of the dead." 
 The spiritual mii-acle of His life and words were the only signs He could 
 vouchsafe w^hile He lived, for at no time did He lay stress on miracles 
 alone as a means of gaining disciples, but subordinated them to His pro- 
 clamation of the Truth. His preaching would itself be a sign like that of 
 the preaching of Jonah to the Ninevites. " The men of that city," said 
 He, " would rise in the judgment day, to witness against this generation, 
 for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and Ho was greater than that 
 prophet. The Queen of the South, who came from Sheba to hear the 
 wisdom of Solomon, would then condemn them ; for she came from the 
 uttermost parts of the earth, and great as they thought the glory of Solo- 
 mon, they had One greater than he before them, in Himself. Vast mul- 
 titudes had gone out to hear John, and had professed repentance ; vast 
 multitudes had followed Himself, and, yet, the result had been only tem- 
 porary and superficial. It would prove with this generation as with a man 
 from whom an unclean spirit has for a time gone out. Meeting no suitable 
 rest elsewhere, it returns, and finding its former dwelling in the man's 
 soul ready for it, allies itself with seven demons still worse than itself, 
 and with their help enters the man once more. The Reformation under 
 John, and under Himself, was Ijut for a time; the nation would fall back 
 again to its old sinful ways, and become ivorse than ever." He foresaw 
 His rejection, and thus foretold it. 
 
 He had silenced the Rabbis, and no doubt by doing so had intensified 
 their hatred; but a new trial awaited Him. The insinuation that His
 
 442 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 brain was affected had reached His family, Avho still lived at ITazareth. 
 The effects of the exhausting toil and constant excitement of these months, 
 had, apparently, led even His friends to fear that He would give way 
 under such tension, and now the hints of the Rabbis that He was possessed, 
 and spoke and acted as He did under demoniacal influence, raised the fear 
 that judicial action would be begun, against Him, on the part of the Jerusa- 
 lem authorities. Yeiy possibly the simple household at Nazareth, who, like 
 other Jews, must have looked on the Raljbis with superstitious reverence, 
 and have shrunk from questioning anything they said, had innocently 
 accepted the insinuation that He was really out of His mind, as a result 
 of being j^ossessed. Prejudiced in favour of the common idea of the 
 Messiah as a national hero, at the head of the Jewish armies, they had not 
 risen to any higher conception, and felt impelled by every motive to inter- 
 fere, and, if possible, put a stop to what seemed to them an unaccountable 
 course of action on His part. It was only about seven hours' distance 
 from Nazareth to Capernaum, over the hills ; they would go and see for 
 themselves ; and so Mary and the brothers and sisters of Jesus— the whole 
 household, for Joseph was dead — set out for Peter's house. 
 
 They arrived while the crowd, excited by the miracle they had just seen, 
 and half believing that Jesus must be the expected Messiah, still filled the 
 house and thronged the courtyard, so that the Rabbis, overawed, could 
 do nothing against Him. Anxious to withdraw Him from His dangerous 
 course, and unable as yet to understand Him, they had come to the con- 
 clusion, perhaps at the instigation of the Rabbis, that the best plan would 
 be to lay hold on Him, and take Him home by force, as one beside Himself. 
 n they could keep Him for a time at Nazareth, under restraint, if neces- 
 sary, the quiet, they hoped, would calm His mind and free Him from His 
 hallucinations. It is wonderful that they could argue with themselves in 
 such a way; especially that Mary could have fancied it madness that He 
 acted as He did, and called Himself the Messiah ; but vision, in spiritual 
 things as in nature, depends, not on the flood of light around us, but on 
 the eye on which it falls. 
 
 On coming near, however, they found they could not make their way 
 through the press, and had to request those near to let Him know their 
 presence, and that they wished to speak with Him. At any moment, when 
 busy with the work of the Kingdom, all lower relations, bonds, and cares 
 of His eaidier life ceased to engage Him, but much more was it so at 
 a time like this, when engrossed with its supreme interests, and with 
 the victory over its enemies which He had hardly as yet completed. 
 The most sacred of earthly ties lost its greatness before the grandeur 
 of spiritual kinship in the new deathless communion He was founding. 
 " Who is my mother ? " asked He, " and who are my brethren ? " Then 
 stretching His hands towards those around Him, " Behold," said He, " my 
 mother and my brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of my Father 
 in Heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." It was the 
 same answer, in effect, as He had, perhaps before this, given when a 
 woman in the crowd, unable to restrain herself, had expressed aloud, her 
 sense of the surpassing honour of her who had borne and nursed Him.
 
 THE BUBSTING OF THE STOEM. 443 
 
 " Yea," replied He, " rather, blessed are they that hear the Word of God 
 and keep it." 
 
 It was from no want of tenderness Jesus thus spoke. A holy duty to 
 Himself, His honour, and His calling, demanded His acting as He did. 
 It was imperative that He should keep Himself from the hands even of 
 His nearest friends, to prevent their unconsciously carrying out the plans 
 of His enemies by violently restraining Him. He had, moreover, founded 
 a new family of which He was the Spiritual Head, and this, henceforth, 
 as it spread among men, was to be His supreme earthly relationship. The 
 ready faith of the Samaritans, and the surpassing example of the heathen 
 centurion, had foreshadowed the extension of the New Kingdom, beyond 
 Israel, to all nations. To do the will of mere men, whether priests or 
 Rabbis, was no longer the condition of heavenly favour. Henceforth, over 
 the earth, to do the will of God was the one condition required to open the 
 gates of the way of life. 
 
 Foiled in their attempt to brand Jesus publicly as in league with the 
 devil, the Pharisees resolved to try the subtler plan of pretending friend- 
 liness, and inviting Him to pai'take of their hospitality, that they might 
 watch what He said, and, if possible, provoke Him to commit Himself in 
 some way that would bring Him within the reach of the law. It was yet 
 early, and one of them asked Him, with this treacherous object, to join 
 the light morning meal, then lately introduced into Palestine by the 
 Romans. He accepted the invitation, with a full knowledge of the spirit 
 in which it had been given. It had been expected, perhaps, that the 
 honour of entertainment in a circle of Rabbis would awe a layman of 
 humble standing like Jesus, but He took care to show His true bearing 
 towards them from the moment He reclined at table. "Washing the hands 
 before eating was in all cases a vital requirement of Pharisaic duty. A 
 Rabbi would rather have suffered death than eat before he had done so. 
 " It is better," said Rabbi Akiba, " in a time of persecution, to die of 
 thirst than to break the commandment, and thus die eternally," and pro- 
 ceeded, before touching food, to wash his hands, with the allowance of 
 drinking water brought him by his jailer. But observance of Pharisaic 
 rules required much more. Christ had jusb come from among a crowd, 
 and had, besides, cast out a devil, and thus doubly defiled, ought to have 
 purified himself by a bath before coming to table with those who were 
 Levitically clean. A Pharisee always bathed himself before eating, on 
 coming from the market-place, to wash away the defilement of contact 
 with the unclean multitude, and it was naturally expected that Jesus 
 would have been equally scrupiilous. He had committed Himself, how- 
 ever, to uncompromising opposition to a system which substituted forms 
 for true spiritual religion, and took His place on the couch without any 
 ceremonial purification. The host and his guests were astonished, and 
 betrayed, at least in their looks, their real feelings towards Him ; bitter 
 enough before, but now fiercer than ever, at this defiant affront to their 
 cherished usages. 
 
 Roused by their uncourteous hostility, He instantly took His position of 
 calm independence and superiority, for He feared no human face, nor any
 
 444 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 combination of human violence. Knowing perfectly that He was alone 
 against the world, He felt that the truth required Him to witness for it, 
 come what might to Himself. 
 
 "I see," said He, "what you are thinking. You Pharisees clean the 
 outside of the cup and the platter, but you fill both, witliin, with the gains 
 of hypocritical robbery and wickedness ; you cleanse the outside of a cup, 
 and think nothing of your own souls being full of all evil. Fools'! did not 
 He who made the outside of a cup make the inside as well ? As He made 
 all outward and visible things, has He not also made all inward and 
 spiritual P How absurd to take so much care of the one and to neglect 
 the other ! Let me tell you how you may attain true purification. Give 
 with willing, loving hearts, what you have in your cups and platters, as alms, 
 and this will make all your ceremonial washings of the outside superfluous, 
 and cleanse both the vessels and your hearts. The Rabbis have told you 
 that ' charity is worth all other virtues together,' but your covetousness is 
 a proverb, for you devour widows' houses, and have invented excuses for 
 a son robbing even his father for your good. But woe to you, Pharisees ! 
 for it is vain to expect this of you, who know nothing of true love. You 
 lay stress on external trifles, and neglect the principles and duties of the 
 inner life ; you tithe petty garden herbs, like mint and rue, and all kinds 
 besides, and are indifferent to right and wrong, and to the love of God. 
 If you wish to tithe the garden herbs it is well to do so, but you should be 
 as zealous for what is much more important. Your vanity is as great as 
 your grasping hypocrisy ! Woe to you, Pharisees ! for ye love the chief 
 seats in the synagogues, and to be flattered by men rising up as you pass 
 in the crowded market-place, and greeting you with reverent salutations 
 of Eabbi, Rabbi, your reverence, your reverence. Woe to you ! you are 
 like graves sunk in the earth, over which men walk, thinking the ground 
 clean, and are defiled when they least suspect it. Men think themselves 
 with saints if in your company, but to be near you is to be near 
 pollution ! " 
 
 A Rabbi among the guests here interrupted Him. " Teacher," said he, 
 "you are condemning not only the common lay Pharisees, but us, the 
 Rabbis." The interruption only turned Jesus against the " lawyers " 
 specially. " Woe to you, lawyers, also ! " said He, " for ye load men with 
 burdens grievous to be borne, while ye, yourselves, touch not these 
 burdens with one of your fingers to help the shoulders to bear them. ■ Ye 
 sit in your chambers and schools, and create legal rules, endless, harassing? 
 intolerable, for the people, but not afi'ecting yourselves — shut out as you are 
 from busy life. Woe to you ! for ye build the tombs of the prophets, but 
 your fathers, in whose acts ye glory, killed them. Shame for their having 
 done so might make you wish those sacred tombs forgotten ; but you have 
 no shame, and rebuild these tombs to win favour with the people, while in 
 your hearts you are ready to repeat to the prophets of to-day the deeds of 
 your fathers towards those of old ! Your pretended reverence for these 
 martyrs, shown in restoring their sepulchres, while you are ready to repeat 
 the wickedness of their murderers, makes these tombs a witness against 
 you. The Holy Spirit had this in view, when He said by me, some time
 
 THE BURSTING OF THE STORM. 445 
 
 since, ' I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will 
 persecute and kill, that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the 
 foundation of the world, may be required of this generation — from the 
 blood of Abel to that of Zachariah, who perished between the altar and 
 the Temple.' Yes, I say unto you, it will be required of this generation. 
 Under the guidance of you lawyers it was that the people treated them 
 as they did ! Woe to j-ou ! you have taken away from the nation the key 
 to the temple of heavenly knowledge, and have made them incapable of 
 recognising the truth, by your teaching. You yourselves have not entered 
 and you have hindered those from entering who were on the point of 
 doing so ! " 
 
 The die was finally cast. Henceforth Jesus stood consciously alone, the 
 rejected of the leaders of His nation. There was before Him only a weary 
 path of persecution, and, at its end, the Cross. An incident recorded by 
 St. Luke, seems to belong to this period. The multitudes thronging to 
 hear the new teaching v,^ere daily greater, in sj^ite of the hostility of the 
 Rabbis ; for their calumnies and insinuations had not yet abated the 
 general excitement. " An innumerable multitude " waited for the re- 
 appearance of Jesus, and hung on His lips to catch every word. He might 
 be attacked and slandered in the house of the Pharisee, but as yet, the 
 crowd looked on Him with astonishment and respect. Opinions differed 
 only as to the scope of His action : that He was a great Rabin, was felt 
 by all. 
 
 It was the custom to refer questions of all kinds to the Rabbis for their 
 counsel and decision, which carried great weight, though it might be 
 informal and extra-judicial. Their words were virtually law, for to dis- 
 pute or oppose them was well-nigh criminal. To get the support of one so 
 great as Jesus, therefore, in any matter, would, as it seemed, decide a 
 point at once in favour of any one He supported. 
 
 One of the crowd, reasoning thus, chose an opportunity to solicit His 
 weighty interference in a question of inheritance, in which there was a 
 strife with a brother. " Teacher," said he, " speak to my brother, that he 
 divide the inheritance with me." But he had utterly misconceived Christ's 
 spirit and sphere. In the briefest and most direct words, the idea that He 
 had anything to do with "judging" or " dividing" in worldly affairs was 
 repudiated. It was not His province. 
 
 The question, however, gave an occasion for solemn warning against the 
 unworthy greed and selfishness which lie at the bottom of all such strife, 
 on one side or the other. Addressing the crowd, wdio had hoard the 
 request, He gave them, in the following parable, a caution against all 
 forms of covetousness, or excessive desire of worldly possessions. 
 
 " Watch," said He, " and keep yourselves from all covetousness. For 
 though a man may abound in riches, his life does not depend on his 
 wealth, but on the will of God, who can lengthen or shorten his existence, 
 and make it happy or sad, at His pleasure. Let me show you what I 
 mean. 
 
 " The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully. And he 
 reasoned within himself, saying, ' What shall I do, because I have no room
 
 446 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 to stow awiiy my crops ? ' And he said, ' This will I do. I Vvdll pull down 
 my barns and build greater, and I will gather together into them all my 
 crops and my property, and will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much 
 l^roperty laid iip for many years ; take thine case, eat, drink, and bo 
 merry.' 
 
 " But God said unto him, ' Fool, this night thy soul is required of thee, 
 and whose will those things be which thou hast prepared ? ' 
 
 "So," added Jesus, "is he who heaps up treasures for himself, and is 
 not rich towards God. Death, coming unexpectedly, even v/hen latest, 
 strips him of all, if he has only thought of himself and of this world. The 
 true wisdom is to use what we have so as to hiy up treasures, by its right 
 employment, in heaven, that God may give us these, after death, in the 
 kingdom of the Messiah." 
 
 < Ak' 
 
 CHAPTER XLII. 
 
 AFTER THE STOrxM. 
 
 THE meal in the house of the Pharisee was a momentous event in the 
 life of Jesus. The fierceness of His enemies had broken out into open 
 rage, so that, as He left, He was followed by the infuriated Eabbis, ges- 
 ticulating, as they pressed round Him, and provoking Him to commit 
 Himself by words of which they might lay hold. A great crowd had 
 meanwhile gathered, partly on His side, partly turned against Him by the 
 arts of His accusers. The excitement had reached its highest. 
 
 With such a multitude before Him, it was certain that He would not let 
 the opportunity pass of proclaiming afresh the New Kingdom of God. It 
 had been called a kingdom of the devil, and it was meet that He should 
 turn aside the calumny. His past mode of teaching did not, however, 
 seem suited for the new circumstances. It had left but small permanent 
 results ; and a new and simpler style of instruction, specially adapted to 
 their dulness and untrained minds and hearts, would at least arrest their 
 attention more surely, and force them to a measure of reflection. Pressing 
 through the vast throng, to the shore of the lake. He entered a fishing boat, 
 and, sitting down at its prow, the highest part of it, began, from this con- 
 venient pulpit, as it lightly rocked on the waters, the first of those won- 
 drous parables, in which He henceforth so frequently embodied His 
 teachings. 
 
 The Parable or Mashal was a mode of instruction already familiar to 
 Israel since the days of the Judges, and was in familiar and constant use 
 among the Rabbis. Its characteristic is the presentation of moral and 
 religious truth in a more vivid form than is possible by mere precept or 
 abstract statement, use being made for this end of some incident drawn 
 from life or nature, by which the lesson sought to be given is pictured to 
 the eye, and thus imprinted on the memory, and made more emphatic. 
 Analogies, hitherto unsusjjected, between familiar natural facts and 
 spiritual phenomena ; lessons of duty enforced by some simple imaginary
 
 AFTER THE STORM. 447 
 
 narrative or incident ; striking parallels and comparisons, wliicli made the 
 homeliest trifles symbols of the highest truths, abound in all the discourses 
 of Jesus, but are still more frequent from this time. Notliing was hence- 
 forth left unused. The light, the darkness, the houses around, the games 
 of childhood, the sightless wayside beggar, the foxes of the hills, the 
 leathern bottles hung up from every rafter, the patched or new garment, 
 and even the noisy hen amidst her chickens, served, in turn, to illustrate 
 some lofty truth. The sower on the hill-side at hand, the gaudy weeds 
 among the corn, the common mustard plant, the leaven in the woman's 
 dough, the treasure disclosed by the passing ploughshare, the pearl 
 brought by the travelling merchant from distant lauds for sale at Beth- 
 saida or Tiberias — at Philip's court or that of Antipas, — the draw-net seen 
 daily on the lake, the pitiless servant, the labourers in the vineyards 
 around — any detail of every-day life, was elevated, as occasion demanded, 
 to be the vehicle of the sublimest lessons. Others have uttered parables ; 
 but Jesus so far transcends them, that He may justly be called the creator 
 of this mode of instruction. 
 
 The first of the wondrous series was, fitly, that of the Sower, for the 
 planting of the New Kingdom must needs be the first stage towards 
 further truths respecting it. In a country like Galilee no illustration 
 could be more easily intelligible, and it is no wonder that Jesus often uses 
 it. As He sat in the Ijoat, with the multitude standing on the shore, each 
 feature of the parable would be before Him — the sower going out from the 
 neighbouring town or village to sow his patch on the unenclosed hill-side, 
 with its varied soil, here warm and deep, there a mere skin over the lime- 
 stone rock, invaded at some spots by thorns, then, as now, so plentiful in 
 Palestine, and crossed by the bridle path, along which men and beasts 
 were passing constantly. The seed was good, and the sower faithfully did 
 his work, but it depended on the soil itself what would be the result, for 
 the rain, and the light, and the heat came equally on all. Part fell on the 
 trodden path — which, itself, though now beaten hard, was once as soft and 
 yielding as any part of the field — and was crushed under foot, or picked 
 up by the birds hovering near. Some fell on spots in which the spring- 
 ing thistles had already taken root, and were about to shoot up in rank 
 visour : some on the shallow skin of earth over the rock, where the hot 
 sun hastened the growth, while the hard rock hindered the root from 
 striking down ; and only a part fell on good soil, and yielded a return for 
 the sower's toil. 
 
 This parable, apparently so self-illustrative, troubled, alike, the minds 
 of the Twelve, and of the wider circle of hearers who had any interest in 
 Christ's words. The mode of teaching was new to them from Him, and 
 the conceptions embodied in what they had heard were directly opposite 
 to all they had been accustomed, as Jews, to associate with the Messianic 
 kingdom. The careless multitude, drawn together only by curiosity, had 
 scattered when Jesus, having finished His address, had returned to Peter's 
 house. Thither, however, a number of graver spirits followed, with the 
 Twelve, to seek the explanation they felt assured would be vouchsafed. It 
 was, indeed, precisely what Jesus desired, for it afforded an opportunity
 
 448 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 for the fuller instruction of all whose state of heart fitted them to receive 
 it, and it drew them into closer personal intercourse Avith Himself. He 
 received them with frank delight. " Unto you, who thus show your in- 
 terest in tlie mysteries of the kingdom of God," said He, " it is given to 
 know them, but to the indifferent outside multitude, they are designedly 
 left veiled in jjarable." To understand spiritual truth, the heart must be 
 in sympathy with it ; otherwise, to try to explain it, would be as idle as to 
 speak of colours to the blind, or of music to the deaf. Where the religious 
 faculty was dead or dormant, religious truth was necessarily incompre- 
 hensible and undesircd. " He came to be a Light to men, and to reveal 
 the truth, not to hide it ; but men mnst have willing ears, and take heed 
 to what they hear, pondering over it in their hearts. To listen only with 
 the outward ear, like the careless multitude, is to draw down the punish- 
 ment of God. In natures thus wilfully indifferent, stolid insensibility only 
 increases, the more they hear. To such, the very word of life becomes a 
 word of death. Eejecting me, the Light, they are given up by God to the 
 darkness they have chosen, and lose, erelong, even the superficial interest 
 in higher things they may have had. 
 
 " Ye, on the other hand," He continued, " who really have received the 
 truth into a willing heart, have thereby proved j^our fitness for higher 
 disclosures, and shall have them. The honest interest you show deter- 
 mines the measure of knowledge you are able to receive, and it will be 
 given you. He who has opened his soul to me will receive continually 
 richer insight into the truth. Alas for those who shut their eyes and stop 
 their ears ! But blessed are your eyes, into which you have let the truth 
 enter, and blessed are j-our ears, into which you have let it sink. Amen ! 
 I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see those things 
 which ye see, and did not see them ; and to hear those things which je 
 hear, and did not hear them." 
 
 Such, in brief explanatory paraphrase, was the welcome to those really 
 anxious to understand the parable, which Jesus forthwith expounded to 
 them ; disclosing, as He did so, conceptions and principles which required 
 a complete revolution in their rainds to understand and api^ropriate. He 
 announced that the ancient kingdom of God was, henceforth, spiritualized, 
 go that the only relation of man to it, from this time, was a moral one ; not, 
 as heretofore, in part a political. So entirely, indeed, was this the case, that 
 He did not even speak of the external agencies or organization by which 
 men should be outwardly received as citizens, but assumed that accejatance 
 depended on the man himself : on his will and his sympathy with what the 
 New Kingdom offered. " The Word is the living Seed of the Gospel. As 
 the embodiment of all truth, it is by follovfing it that the Will of God is 
 realized by men, and the one grand law of the kingdom thus obeyed. It 
 is given to men, as the seed to the ground, and they can hear and under- 
 stand it if they choose, biit all depends on their doing so. As the strewn 
 seed neither sjirings nor bears fruit on much of the ground, and fails 
 except where it sinks into good soil, so the relations of men to the Word 
 of God are very various. Few, it may be, receive it aright, but it is always 
 the fault of men themselves if it be not living seed in their hearts.
 
 AFTER THE STORM. 449 
 
 Worldly indifference may have made tlio soil impenetrable as the trodden 
 path, or have left only a skin of sentiment over hidden callousness ; or 
 worldly cares or pleasures may spring uji rankly, and choke the better 
 growth; in all cases it is the man, not the seed or the sower, on whom the 
 result turns. Before all things, this is to be felt, so that no one may 
 imagine that entrance into the New Kingdom depends on any but moral 
 conditions. Every merely outward claim to citizenship must be laid 
 aside ; it is a matter strictly between God and the soul. The more corn- 
 ])letely this is done, the greater the fitness for entrance. We must be 
 willing simply to receive, without a thought of merit or right, what God 
 is pleased to give of His free bounty. The New Kingdom is, in truth, 
 altogether spiritual. It works directly on the soul, by spiritual truth. It 
 advances in the individual and the world, not by outward power, or 
 political glory, or by miracles, but by the Word sown in the heart, and its 
 aim, like its nature, is sjoiritual ; to make the heart and life visibly fruitful 
 in all heavenly grace." 
 
 As the parable of the sower described the planting of the New Kingdom 
 in tlie heart, others set forth the secret invisible energy of the Word, by 
 the indestructible vigour of which the New Kingdom unfolds itself in the 
 individual and in the world. It was compared to the silent and mysterious 
 growth of seed, which springs up by unperceived development, first into 
 the blade, then into the ear, and finally into the ripened corn. The 
 triumjihant future found an analogy in the growth of a grain of mustard- 
 seed— which, though at first a mere speck, grows to be greater than the 
 herbs, shooting out wide branches, and becoming a tree, in the shade of 
 which the birds of the air come and lodge. It found another in the silent 
 leavening of three measures of meal by a spot of yeast hidden in them. 
 As surely as the seed will spring, or the mustard-seed become a tree, or 
 the yeast spread through all the three measures of meal, as certainly as 
 the spark kindles to a flame, the New Kingdom will grow and expand to 
 world-wide glory. It needs no battles to be won, as the hearers fancied ; 
 no violent revolutions. Jesus knew that the living force of truth in each 
 single heart must diffuse itself, and that, as soul after soul was won, it 
 would silently revolutionize the world, and leaven all humanity. 
 
 That there should be hindrances was only natural, and these He 
 shadowed out in the pai-able of the tares secretly sown by an enemy in a 
 man's field, and undistinguishable from the gi'ain till both had come to 
 fruit. For the sake of the wheat, both were left, by the householder, till 
 the harvest, but in the end, the tares would be gathered for burning, and 
 the wheat for the barn. The full meaning of this parable was given after- 
 wards by Jesus Himself. The visible Church would include in it, till 
 the last day, many who were not true members. To separate them is 
 not the part of man, but of the Judge. But this is, and could be, meant 
 only in a general sense ; for the whole spirit of the Gospels implies the 
 rejection of the openly unworthy, and their reception again on their 
 repentance. "Those who to-day are thorns," says Augustine, "may be 
 wheat to-morrow." 
 
 " So," said He, also, " my kingdom may be likened to a net cast into tho 
 
 G G
 
 450 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 lake ; wliich encloses good fish and bad, and, when full, is drawn to shore, 
 and the good gathered into vessels, while the bad are cast away." 
 
 The supreme worth of citizenship in His kingdom He set forth in 
 separate parables. It was like a treasure hidden in a field, which, when 
 fonnd, so filled the heart of the discoverer, that for joy, he Avent a\Yay and 
 sold all he had, and bought the field, that the treasure might be his. Or, 
 it was like a priceless pearl met with by a merchant seeking such a 
 treasure, and secured by him at the cost of all he had. The kingdom 
 might be found by some without their seeking it, as the treasure by the 
 peasant in the field; or it might be met by one in earnest search for it, like 
 him who found the costly pearl. In either case, it could only be obtained 
 by joyful self-sacrifice of all things else for its sake, and by the realization 
 of the worthlessness of all human possessions in comjiarison with it. 
 
 It is not certain that all these parables were spoken the same day, 
 though there is nothing improbable in the supposition that Jesus should 
 have given such a free utterance to the wealth of imagery and illustration 
 which flowed from His lips with no mental effort. But the evening came 
 at last, and found Him wearied out with the work and agitations of such 
 an eventful day. Capernaum could, however, no longer be the quiet homo 
 for Him which it had been. The fierce rage of the priests and Rabbis in 
 the morning, and their intrigue with the household of Nazareth, to lay 
 hold on Him as a madman, possessed with a devil, showed that they would 
 stop at no wickedness to get Him into their power. The controversy 
 respecting Him had penetrated every humble cottage, and quiet work was 
 no longer possible. Moreover, it was necessary to introduce His disci})] es 
 to a wider sphere of life and work than Capernaum and the little districts 
 round it, in prejoaration for their independent action, and to form and 
 strengthen their character and power of self-reliance by putting it to the 
 proof, and revealing to them the weaknesses yet to be overcome. 
 
 The walls of lonely hills on the east side of the lake, seamed by deep 
 gorges through which the path led to the vast upland plains of the eastern 
 Jordan — a region little known to the busy population of Galilee, and in 
 bad reputation with most, as more heathen than Jewish — offered Him a 
 secure retreat. Instead of returning to Peter's house, where new troubles 
 might have awaited Him, He ordered His disciples to carry Him to the 
 opposite shore, that He might escape from all painful scenes, and enjoy 
 peace and rest for a time. His enemies would not be likely to seek a 
 Eabbi like Him in such an unclean district ; least of all in the neighbour- 
 hood He first visited — that of the heathen city, Gadara. 
 
 But the incidents of the day were not jet over. The streets on the way 
 to the boat were full of the evening gossips, glad to talk with their 
 neighbours in the browning twilight, now their day's work was done ; and, 
 with others lingering about, in the hope of seeing the great Rabbi. A 
 number of these soon gathered round Christ and His disciples as they 
 made towards the shore, and at last the silence was broken by one of them, 
 strange to say, himself a Rabbi, offering to follow Him as His scholar. 
 " Teacher," said he, " I will follow thee wherever you go." It might have 
 seemed a great thing for one in the position of Jesus to have a Rablrl
 
 AFTER THE STOEM. 451 
 
 among His discijjles, but He never courted human aid, or acted on mere 
 expediency. Tlie highest, no less than the humblest, could only be re- 
 ceived on the condition of absolute self-sacrifice and sincerity, Nor did 
 He readily accept those who offered themselves, but chose rather to 
 summon such as He wished, to His immediate circle. " Ye have not 
 chosen me," He said, on a future occasion, " but I have chosen you." He 
 returned, therefore, only an answer whicli should test the applicant's 
 motives to the uttermost. " The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air 
 nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head." Virtually 
 driven from the one dwelling at Capernaum He could regard as His home, 
 and rejected from ISTazareth, He was, henceforth, a wanderer, with no fixed 
 dwelling. From this time He was almost a fugitive from His enemieSf 
 never remaining long in any one place — a homeless and houseless man. 
 
 To a second applicant, who professed himself willing to follow Him as 
 soon as he had discharged the laious duty of burying his father, the start- 
 ling answer was returned, " Let the (spiritually) dead bury their dead, but 
 go thou and preach the kingdom of God." Under other circumstances 
 Christ would have commended such filial love ; but it was necessary now 
 to show, by a supreme example, that those who sought to follow Him must 
 deny natural feelings, otherwise entirely sacred, when the interests of the 
 kingdom of God required it. He had in mind, doubtless, the thirty days' 
 mourning that were virtually implied, and knew the results of indecision 
 in a matter so paramount. It was, moreover, a requirement of the Eabbis, 
 in similar cases, that if any one who wished to be a scholar of the Law, 
 had to choose between burying even his nearest relation — his parent, or 
 his brother, or sister — and devoting himself at once to his sacred calling, 
 he should leave the burial to others, as the less important duty, and give 
 himself up on the moment, undividedly to the Law. The words of Jesus 
 were the familiar and well-known expression of this recognised condition 
 of even Rabbinical discipleship. The applicant would have been recjuired 
 to act thus had he chosen to follow a Ealjbi, and less devotion and sincerity 
 could not be demanded in the service of the New Kingdom. 
 
 A third, who asked leave before finally following Christ, to go home and 
 bid his family circle farewell, received a similar answer, — "No one having 
 put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of 
 God ; he who gives himself up to the kingdom of God, must do so with 
 an undivided heart, suffering no earthly cares to distract him." 
 
 He had set out for the lake side as soon as the multitudes had scattered 
 sufficiently to open the way : and now, having reached it, He went into a 
 fishing-boat, just as He was, and they pushed off in company with some 
 other boats. It was already late for Orientals to be abroad, and the rest 
 in the open air, after such coiitinuous mental and bodily excitement, soon 
 brought the sweet relief of deep refresliing sleep. We never hear of Jesus 
 being ill : and, indeed, such a life as His, utterly free from all disturbing 
 causes which might induce disease, may well have been exceptionally 
 healthy. The coarse leather boss of the steersman's seat, at the end of 
 the boat, suSiced for a pillow, and presently He forgot, in deep slumber, 
 the cares and labours of the day.
 
 452 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 The sail across, however, though usually so refreshing and delightful, 
 was destined to be rudely disturbed. The lake lies in its deep bed among 
 the hills, ordinarily, smooth as a mirror, but sudden storms at times rush 
 down every wady on the north-east and east, and lash the waters into 
 furious roughness. The winds sweeping over the vast bare table-land of 
 Gaulonitis and the Hauran and the boundless desert beyond, pour down 
 the deep ravines and gorges, cut in the course of ages by streams and 
 torrents, on their way to the lake, and lash it into incredible commotion. 
 Its position, about six hundred feet below the Mediterranean, induces such 
 sudden hurricanes, the lower level heating the air over the waters till the 
 colder atmosphere of the hills rushes down to fill the vacuum caused by 
 the rarefaction. 
 
 Such a storm now burst on the calm bosom of the lake, and jiresently 
 raised the waves to such a height, that the unprotected boat was all but 
 swamped. In the wild roaring of the wind — amidst blinding torrents of 
 rain, and the thick darkness of the hurricane cloud, which blotted out the 
 stars ; and the dashing of the sea, which broke over them each moment — 
 even bronzed sailors like the Twelve lost their presence of mind, and were 
 filled with dismay. Driven before the wind, they were fast filling, and, as 
 it seemed, must presently go down. Through all the wild tumult of wind, 
 darkness, rain, and sea, however, Jesus lay peacefully asleep, so profoundly 
 had He been exhausted. It seemed as if He were indifferent to their fate. 
 In their natural reverence they long hesitated to rouse Him, but at last 
 did so, and ajipealed to Him to save them. Amidst the terror around. He 
 was entirely self-jiosscssed. Rising, He gently rebuked the fear that had 
 so unnerved them, and then, with an awful sublimity, rebuked the wind as 
 if it had been a living power, and bade the angry sea be still ; and both 
 wind and sea at once obeyed Him. A great calm sjoread over the lake. 
 "Why are ye fearful," said He, " ye of little faith?" They had seen 
 Him control disease, cast out devils, and even raise the dead ; could they 
 not have felt assured that neither winds nor waves could harm them when 
 He was there ? What manner of man is this ?" muttered the awe-struck 
 Apostles, " for He commands even the winds and water, and they obey 
 Him ! " 
 
 The boat had been driven to the southern end of the lake, and Christ 
 consequently landed in the territory of the city of Gadara, a half -heathen 
 town on the table-land, twelve hundred feet above the shore, and at some 
 distance from it. It was then in its glory, and lay round the top of the 
 hill, looking far over the country. Long avenues of marble pillars lined 
 its streets ; fine buildings of squared stones abounded. Two great amjjhi- 
 theatres of black basalt adorned the west and north sides, and there was 
 a third theatre near its splendid public baths. It was the proud home of 
 a great trading community, to whom life was bright and warm when 
 Jesus landed that morning, on the shore beneath, and looked up towards 
 its walls. 
 
 The hill on which Gadara stands is of soft limestone, full, like the lime- 
 stone of Palestine generally, of larger and smaller caves, many of which 
 had been enlarged by the poorer classes and turned into dwelling-places,
 
 AFTER THE STORM. 453 
 
 for which they are used even now, while others had been converted into 
 tombs, with massive stone doors. The roadside is still strewn with a 
 number of sarcophagi of basalt, sculptiTred with low reliefs of genii, gar- 
 lands, wreaths of flowers, and human faces, in good preservation, though 
 long emptied of their dead. 
 
 Madness in every form has, in all ages, been treated by the rude thera- 
 peutics of the East, as a supernatural visitation, with which it is unsafe 
 to interfere more than is needed, and hence, even at this day, furious and 
 dangerous maniacs may, from time to time, be seen in the towns of Pales- 
 tine, in some cases, absolutely naked. Others, equally furious, often 
 betake themselves to the mountains, and sleep in tombs and caves. In 
 their jiaroxysms they become terribly dangerous, for their mental excite- 
 ment gives them prodigious strength, and hence, one is sometimes a terror 
 to a whole neighbourhood. 
 
 Two such madmen, it seems, had taken up their abode in the caves and 
 tombs by the side of the road from the lake to Gadara, and had made it 
 almost impassable, from their fierceness. Jesus had hardly set His foot 
 on shore before they sallied out towards Him, shrieking amidst the wild 
 howls of their frenzy, as they approached, in deprecation of His inter- 
 ference with them. From some reason, now unknown, St. ]\rark and St. 
 Luke speak only of one of these two sufferers, and as their account is the 
 fuller, it is better to keep to it. Both were more than merely insane : 
 they Avere possessed with devils, and conscious that they were so. As in 
 similar cases, the demoniac jDresence controlled the human will, and spoke 
 in its own name. Both had already shown their terror at the coming of 
 One whom they recognised as the Son of God, and adjured Him not to 
 torment them before the time. But now the one of whom especially St. 
 Mark and St. Luke speak, ran and fell down before Jesus, in the manner 
 of Eastern reverence. He had been a terror to the whole country side, 
 for he would wear no clothes, but roamed the hills, naked, and would live 
 only in the tombs. Efforts had been made to jiut him in restraint, but 
 neither the ropes nor chains used had sufliced to hold him. Night and 
 day he wandered the mountains, driven hither and thither by the myste- 
 rious possession that had him in its power, filling the air with his howls 
 and shrieks, and cutting himself with sharp stones in his frenzy. But a 
 greater than the strong man by whom he was enslaved was now here. 
 Though dreading His presence, the demon could not keep away from it. 
 It may be that, in the confused human consciousness, there was yet a 
 glimmer of reason and moral health which drove him to the Saviour ; but, 
 if so, the spirit took the word from him, and spoke in his stead. " What 
 is thy name ? " said Jesus to the demon, and the mysterious answer was, 
 " Legion, for we are many." Forthwith came the command to depart out 
 of the man. But, true to diabolical instinct, the spirits Avould fain injure, 
 even in leaving. On the slopes of the hill, a great herd of swine, the un- 
 clean and hateful abomination of the Jew, were feeding. They were, doubt- 
 less, owned by some of the heathen citizens of Gadara, for swine were in 
 great demand among the foreign population, as sacrifices and food. " Send 
 us into the swine," cried the devils, " and do not drive us into the abyss," 
 
 \
 
 454 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 and the request was granted, to the destruction of the whole herd, which 
 ran violently down the slojie into the lake and were drowned. Jesus, as _ 
 Son of God, was free to act at His will with all things, for they were all ' 
 His by the supreme right of creation, and this right is continually used 
 in the moral government of the world. There is no ground for a moment's 
 discussion respecting an act of One to wliom all things were committed, 
 as Head of the New Kingdom, by the Father. 
 
 It is idle, in our utter ignorance of the spirit world, to raise difficulties, 
 as some have done, at this incident. It is recorded in three of the four 
 Gospels, and cannot be explained away except by doing violence to the 
 concurrent language of the three Evangelists. However mysterious, it is 
 no more so than many facts in the life of Jesus, and must be taken simply 
 as it stands. 
 
 The terror of the Apostles in the storm had shown how little Jesus 
 could rely on them in the far worse trials of f utiu-e years ; but the mighty 
 power He had shown in stilling the tumult of the elements, had been a 
 lesson of confidence in Him, which they could hardly forget. It was a 
 further step in their training to trust in Him, wlicu they now saw Him 
 perform the still more wonderful miracle of calming the inward tempest 
 of a human soul. In neither case could they say a word. They stood 
 silent and ashamed. They were far, as yet, from having grown to the 
 spiritual manhood of their great office. 
 
 The new teaching of Jesus had excited, for a time, a wide popularity 
 that had even besieged His dwelling and thronged His person. The people 
 had given Him their unhesitating confidence. But His collisions with the 
 priests and Kabbis, and His disturbed relations to His family — with the 
 whisperings of calumny on all sides— had chilled the enthusiasm of many. 
 Distrust and suspicion had been sown in hitherto trustfid minds, and these 
 reports had penetrated even to the east of Jordan. Their earliest open 
 results were seen at Gadara, for it was here He first met with open want 
 of sympathy with His person and work. The incident of the destruction 
 of the swine, infuriating the owners, was enough, with what they had 
 heard before, to turn the people against Him. The insinuation that He 
 cast out devils by a league with their chief, filled weak minds with terror. 
 He had hardly landed, and was in sore need of rest, yet was at once 
 forced to leave. For the first time, the disciples had an example of that 
 invincible unbelief they were, hereafter, to meet so often. But, if Jesus 
 were hindered from preaching in Decapolis, He had the satisfaction of 
 leaving behind Him the former maniac, now clothed and in his right 
 mind, to spread the fact of his deliverance. The poor man would fain have 
 followed his Benefactor, but Jesus had other Avork for him. Contrary to 
 His rule hitherto. He dismissed him, with directions to go home to his- 
 friends, and tell them the great things the Lord had done for him, and 
 how He had had compassion on him. His preacliing, however simple, was 
 a seed of future good in these regions. 
 
 Forced to return to Capernaum, Jesus had scarcely landed, when a de- 
 mand was made on His sympathy which He could not resist. One of the 
 rulers, or chief men of the synagogue, a local dignitary, named Jairus,
 
 AFTEE THE STORM. 455 
 
 Iiad an only daughter, a rising girl of about twelve, at the point of death. 
 After all that had passed between Jesus and the Rabbis in the town, it 
 must have been a great effort for one in the position, and with the inevit- 
 able prejudices of Jairus, to seek His aid ; but distress humbles pi-ide, 
 and often quickens faith. Pressing towards Him, he fell at His feet, — as 
 inferiors then did, and still do, in the East, before those greatly above 
 them, — regardless of the crowd around, and besought Him to come and 
 lay His hand on his child, and restore her to health. A heart that sympa- 
 thized with all sorrow could not withstand such an appeal, and, forthwith) 
 He set out to the ruler's house, through the throng that attended all His 
 movements. Before arriving there, however, a message came that the 
 sufferer was dead, and that there was no need of further trouble. They 
 little knew who was on His way to them. "Be not afraid," said He to 
 the ruler, " only believe." The crowd of relatives and friends that always 
 throng the chamber of death in Palestine, had already begun the pitiful 
 wails and cries of Eastern lamentations, and dirge-flutes had commenced 
 to add their sad burden to the tumrJt. Jesus had perhaps been delayed 
 before starting, and, as preparations for burial commence as soon as breath 
 leaves the body, the corpse had probably been washed, and laid out in the 
 customary way for the grave, before He came. 
 
 The noise and confusion were not in keeping with the work Jesus de- 
 signed. " Why make ye this ado and weep P " said He, as He entered ; 
 " the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth." He used the word, doubtless, 
 just as He afterwards did in the case of Lazarus, but they mocked at His 
 pretended knowledge, which seemed to impute error to themselves ; for 
 they knew that she was dead. He was the Prince of Peace, and would 
 have no such disturbing excitement, and therefore caused the crowd to 
 leave the chamber of death. Only the father and mother of the girl, and 
 the three disciples, Peter, James, and John, were allowed to see His 
 triumph over the King of Terrors. Taking the damsel by the hand, and 
 using words of the language of His people, — " Talitha cumi — Damsel, I say 
 unto thee, arise,"— the spirit returned to the pale form, and she rose and 
 walked. But in Capernaum, at a time when His enemies were so keenly 
 watchful, cautious obscurity was needed, and He therefore enjoined silence 
 as to the miracle. 
 
 On the way a touching incident had happened. A woman, troubled for 
 many years with an internal ailment, after " having suffered many things 
 of many physicians, and having spent her all " in the vain hope of cure, 
 resolved to seek help froin Jesus. It is no wonder that she had given up 
 the faculty of the day, for their practice was in keeping with tlie scientific 
 ignorance of the times. Lightfoot cpiotes from the Talmud the Jewish 
 medical treatment of such a complaint. It was as follows : " Take of the 
 gum of Alexandria the weight of a zuzee (a fractional silver coin) ; of 
 alum the same ; of crocus the same. Let them be bruised together, and 
 given in wine to the woman that has an issue of blood. If this does not 
 benefit, take of Persian onions three logs (pints) ; boil them in wine and 
 give her to rbink, and say, ' Arise from thy flux.' If this docs not cure 
 her, set her in a place where two ways meet, and let her hold a cup of wine
 
 456 THE LIFE OF CHIIIST. 
 
 in her right hand, and let some one come behind and frighten her, and say, 
 'Arise from thy flux.' But if that do no good, take a handful of cummin 
 (a kind of fennel), a handful of crocus, and a handful of fenugreek (another 
 kind of fennel). Let these be boiled in wine, and give them her to drink, 
 and say, ' Arise from thy flux.' " If these do no good, other cures, over 
 ten in number, are prescribed ; among them, this — " Let them dig seven 
 ditches, in which let them burn some cuttings of vines, not yet four years 
 old. Let her take in her hand a cup of wine, and let them lead her away 
 from this ditch, atid make her sit down over that. And let them remove 
 her from that, and make her sit down over another, saying to her at each 
 remove,— 'Arise from thy flux.'" 
 
 But these were only a few of the more harmless prescriptions in vogue. 
 The condition of medical science in the East may be judged from its 
 character at the centre of civilization and progress in the West. Pliny's 
 Natural History gives us some curious glimpses of this. Ashes of burnt 
 wolf's skull, stags' horns, the heads of mice, the eyes of crabs, owls' brains, 
 the livers of frogs, vipers' fat, grasshoppers, bats, etc., supplied the alkalis 
 which were prescribed. Physicians were wont to order doses of the gall 
 of wild swine, of horses' foam, of woman's milk ; the laying a piece of ser- 
 pent's skin on an afi^eeted part, mixtures of the urine of cows that had not 
 been sucked, the fat of bears, the juice of boiled bucks' horns, and other 
 similar abominations. For colic, they prescribed the dung of swine or 
 hares, for dysentery powdered horses' teeth, for affections of the bladder 
 the urine of wild swine, or asses' kidneys, or plasters of mice-dung. It 
 was a great assistance in childbirth if the mother, or any of her circle, ate 
 wolf's flesh. Cold in the head was cured by kissing a mule's nose. Sore 
 throat was removed by embrocations of snails' slime, and the inhalation of 
 the fumes of snails slowly burnt. Quinsy was cured with the brain of the 
 marsh owl; diseases of the lungs, with mouse-flesh; disorders of the 
 stomach with boiled snails, of which, however, only an odd number must 
 be taken ; weakness of the bowels, with powdered bats ; miscarriages were 
 prevented by carrying about with one a liviiig ami^hisbeena, a small snake 
 which was believed to be able to go either backwards or forwards ; frogs' 
 eyes were useful for contusions, if the eyes were taken out at the conjunc- 
 tion of the moon, and kept in an egg-shelL Frogs boiled in vinegar were 
 sovereign for tooth-ache ; for cough, the slime of frogs which had been 
 hung up by the feet ; for rupture, sea hedgehogs — the echinus— dissolved 
 in asses' milk ; for diseases of the glands, scorpions boiled in wine ; for 
 ague or intermittent fever, the stone from the head of sea-eels, but it must 
 be taken out at the full moon. 
 
 The poor woman who now determined to seek help from Jesus had en- 
 dured all the tortures of such medical treatment for twelve years, and, of 
 course, was hurt rather than healed. She could not, however, venture to 
 spoak to Jesus ; perhajDS womanly shame to tell her disease in public kept 
 her back ; perhaps reverence for One so mysteriously above other men. 
 Besides, she was unclean, and had to stand aloof from society. Joining 
 the crowd following Him to the house of Jairus, she could only dare to 
 touch the zizith, or tassel, that hung on the corner of His outer garment,
 
 AFTER THE STORM. 457 
 
 as on those of all othei' Jews. The touch at once healed her, but it did nob 
 pass unnoticed. To have let it do so, might have seemed to give counte- 
 nance to a superstitious fancy that His clothes had virtue in themselves. 
 Turning round, He at once asked who touched Him. She could no longer 
 hide her act, and, alarmed lest her boldness should be punished by the 
 renewal of the trouljle she now felt to have been healed, fell down before 
 Him, and told Him all the truth. It was enough. " Daughter," said He, 
 "tliy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy 
 plague." 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII. 
 
 DAKK AND BRIGHT. 
 
 AMONG- the crowd that had gathered round the house of Jairus, the 
 supernatural powers of Jesus found renewed exercise. No sooner 
 had He reappeared than two blind men followed Him to Peter's house, 
 appealing to Him as the long-expected Messiah — " Have mercy upon us, 
 Son of David." It was an invariable condition of His granting His mira- 
 culous aid that those who sought it should come with sincere and trustful 
 hearts, for to such alone could any higher good be gained by mere outward 
 relief. The poor men eagerly assured Him that they believed He could do 
 what they asked, and with a touch of His hand their eyes were opened. 
 •' According to your faith," said He, " be it unto you." The prudent 
 charge not to speak of their restored sight, so necessary after all that had 
 lately passed, was heard only to be forgotten, for, in their joy, they could 
 not refrain from publishing it wherever they went. Another miracle of 
 these days is recorded — the casting out a devil from one who was dumb, 
 so that the sufferer, henceforth, spoke freely. The multitudes were 
 greatly moved by such repeated demonstrations of transcendent power, 
 which seemed to surpass all that had ever been seen in Israel, but 
 this popularity embittered His enemies the more. Repeating their old 
 blasphemy, they could only mutter, "He casts out devils by being in 
 league with their prince." That He should thus recognise classes whom 
 they represented as accursed, and from whom they withdrew themselves 
 as unclean, seemed a reflection on their teaching and conduct. The blind, 
 the leper, the poor, and the childless, were alike accounted stricken of 
 God, and " dead," by the hard Judaism of the day, and yet He associated 
 freely with all who sought Him. Either He or they must be vitally 
 wrong. 
 
 It was now late in the year, and the Twelve had not yet gone out on any 
 independent mission. He had taken them with Him on His circuits round 
 Capernaum, to train them for wider fields. They had seen Him scatter- 
 ing the first seed, and caring for it in its growth ; preserving what had 
 been won, strengthening the weak, and calling the cai^eless to repentance. 
 Their experience, though gained in this narrow sphere, had been widely 
 varied. More lately they had seen unbelief in the Gadarenes, weak faith 
 in themselves, and loving trust in the woman who had touched Jesus, and
 
 458 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 even in the two blind men at Peter's house. Another lesson, however, was 
 needed— that of fierce opposition— which they were destined to meet so 
 often hereafter. 
 
 Jesus had never visited Nazareth since His leaving it, and His heart 
 must have yearned to proclaim the New Khigdom to the population among 
 whom He had lived so long. The visit of Mary and of His sisters and 
 brothers, to Capernaum, to take Him away with them, however mistaken, 
 had, doubtless, been prompted by the tenderest motives. Simple country 
 people, they had heard from their holy Eal)bis that He whom they so 
 loved had overstrained His mind and body till His reason had failed, and 
 that there was ground to fear that the Evil One had secretly taken ad- 
 vantage of His enthusiasm to work miracles by His hands. What could 
 it be, indeed, but serving the Prince of Darkness, to slight the sacred 
 traditions by acts like mixing with the common people witliout bathing 
 afterwards, or breaking the Sabbath by healing on it, or by allowing the 
 disciples to pluck corn and rub it in their hands on the holy day, or letting 
 a leper come near Him, or eating v/ith unclean publicans and sinners ? He 
 was a revolutionist ; He was turning the world ujiside down ; He was 
 questioning the wisdom and authority of the Eabbis ; and who but the devil 
 or his emissary could do that ? 
 
 It was a grave matter, however, to revisit Nazareth. If His nearest 
 relatives had given way to such fears respecting Him, what could He 
 expect from the multitude, who had known Him only in His humble ob- 
 scurity P He must seem to them, at the least, a dangerous disturber of 
 the religion of the land; a fanatic who was stirring up confusion in Israel. 
 But, where duty called. He never knew fear. In company with His dis- 
 ciples He set out from Capernaum, taking the road along the hills by the 
 lake, to Magdala, turning westward from it, through the Valley of Doves, 
 by Arbela, with its high cliffs and robber caves, and the Horns of Ilattin, 
 past Tabor, south-westerly to Nazareth. It was only a journey of seven 
 hours, and could easily be made in a day. He stayed in Nazareth several 
 days, no doubt in His mother's house. 
 
 The sword had already begun to pierce the Yirgin's heart. Tender, 
 humble, patient, and loving, she had trials we cannot realize. Knowing 
 that her son was the Messiah, her faith was sorely perplexed by His past 
 course, for her ideas were those of her nation, and His were wholly oppo- 
 site. Her intimate knowledge of the sacred oracles of her people had 
 shown itself in the Magnificat : her simple trust in God, her hajjpy thank- 
 fulness of soul, her musing thoughtfulness, her modest humility, her 
 strength of mind and energy of purpose, had all been seen in earlier 
 days, and, no doubt, as she grew older, the light of a higher world was 
 reflected with ever-increasing glory from her soul. But she was, and must 
 have been, in sore trouble at the position of her Son. His first interview 
 with her has been conceived thus :— 
 
 " Eefreshment over, and thanks returned, with covered head, by Jesus, 
 we m^y fancy how Mary followed Him to His own chamber. When, at 
 last, she thus had Him alone, she fell on His neck ; but instead of kissing 
 Him, as she had done a thousand times, secretly, in spirit, she hid her
 
 DAEK AND BRIGHT. 459 
 
 face on His shoulder, find a stream of tears fell from her eyes. She wcpfc 
 without speaking, and would not let Him go. 
 
 " At last, Jesus said, ' Mother, be calm, and sit down by me, and tell 
 me why you weep.' She did so, and began — her hand in His, and His 
 eyes fixed on hers — 'I rejoice that at last I have you again, and grieve 
 that we shall soon have once more to part.' 'Do you know, then,' asked 
 Jesus, ' how soon or how late I shall leave this world ? ' ' O my child,' 
 replied Mary, ' does not the deathly whiteness of your face tell me that 
 yon are wearing yourself out ? and if you do not wear yourself out, though 
 I am a woman, shut in by the four corners of my house, how can I help 
 seeing that the hatred of your enemies increases daily, and that they have 
 long sworn your death ? ' 'Granted,' broke in Jesus, 'but have not a great 
 part of the people banded round me, and does not this stand in the way 
 of the plots against me ? ' ' Indeed,' replied Mary, ' the might of your 
 preaching, your independence towards those in power at Jerusalem, the 
 novelty of your whole appearance, and, above all, your miracles, have won 
 many to your side, but the favour of the people is like a rain-torrent, which 
 swells quickly only to pass away as soon.' ' You are right, O blessed 
 among women,' answered Jesus ; ' most of this people seek not salvation 
 from sin, but from quite other burdens, and when the decisive moment 
 comes, they will forsake me, faint-heartedly and ungratefully. Your look 
 into the future does not deceive you, but even the enmity and evil of men 
 serve the counsels of God, which I came to fulfil. My way goes down- 
 wards to deep darkness, from which my soul shi'inks, but I follow the will 
 of my Father, whether the road be up or do'wn.' As he spoke. His coun- 
 tenance, which had been clouded for a moment, was, as it were, trans- 
 figured, as the Divine in His nature shone through the human ; and Mary, 
 drinking in all these beams, thrilled with a more than mortal joy. There 
 was a long pause. Mary was silent, but she was, as always, wrapt in 
 prayer. ' Fair,' said she, in the thoughts of her soul, ' is the rising sun, 
 fair the green vine, fair the blue sea, but fairer than all is He. What an 
 hour is this ! My eyes have beheld the King in His beauty.' " The pic- 
 ture is beautiful, but it ascribes feelings to Mary which sprang only later. 
 It had been the instinctive practice of Jesus, from early childhood, to 
 attend all the synagogue services, and He was still suffered to do so, in 
 spite of the opposition He had excited. When Sabbath came, therefore. 
 He went to morning worshijD, and, after the reading of the Toi'ah, stood 
 up in silent offer to read the Haphtara of the day from the Prophets. He 
 was forthwith called to the reading desk, wlien the Sheliach Tsibbur, or 
 Hazan, handed him the roll. The lesson for the day could not have been 
 more appropriate, for it contained the passage of Isaiah which spoke of the 
 Messiah — " The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He anointed me to 
 preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent mo to proclaim deliverance to 
 the captives, and ]-ccovery of sight to the blind : to set at liberty the op- 
 pressed : to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." Then sitting down, 
 He began His Midrash, or explanation, commenting on the passage in lan- 
 guage which astonished the hearers, and applying the predictions of the 
 prophets to Hijnself.
 
 460 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 But the honest wonder and delight at His words speedily gave way 
 to less friendly feeling. Whispers soon ran through the congregation 
 respecting Him. How came He by such wisdom ? He belonged to no 
 school ; claimed no place in the succession of Rabbis : sjioke on His own 
 authority, without ordination or sanction from the doctors. Is not this 
 the carpenter, the son of Mary and Joseph, the brother of James and 
 Joses, and of Juda and Simon ? and are not His sisters here with us ? 
 They could not realize tliat One with whom, and with whose circle, they 
 had been on familiar relations could be a prophet. Perhaps His freedom 
 towards the traditions had offended the strict notions of some of His 
 brothers, and the petty jealousy of a country village could not acknow- 
 ledge a superior in one M'hom they had long treated as an equal, or even 
 an inferior. His humble origin, His position as a carpenter — a trade He 
 had learned among them — the absence of anything special in His family, 
 and the fact that even they did not acknowledge His claims, were all re- 
 membered. Perhaps jealousy of Capernaum mingled with other thoughts, 
 for He had done miracles there, and none in Nazareth. Moreover, if He 
 did not belong to the schools, He could not speak or act by inspiration 
 from above, for the Rabbis were the teachers appointed by God. He must 
 do His miracles, as the Eabbis said, by the help of the devil. He could 
 not, they began to think, have come by His knowledge and eloquence by 
 fair means, or in the usual way. He must have unholy aid. 
 
 This was enough to turn the synagogue against Him, and His own 
 words intensified the revolution of feeling, and brought it to a crisis. He 
 frankly told them that He knew they thought " that befoi'e helping them 
 He should helj) Himself, by removing the suspicion and disrespect they 
 growingly felt ; doing miracles like those of Capernaum, as the only way 
 to convince them of His claims ! But He would not do in Nazareth what 
 He had done there, for He well knew that no prophet had any honour in 
 his own country. Had not Elijah confined his miraculous power to stran- 
 gers, and they heathen, and withdrawn it from Israel ? Their hardness 
 of heart enforced the same on Him, and if Israel, as a whole, showed a 
 like spirit, it, also, would see His mighty works withdrawn, and shown 
 among the heathen." They could stand no more. The whole synagogue 
 rose in commotion, and in wild uproar hustled Him towards the steep 
 wall of rock hard by, to throw Him from it, headlong. But His time was 
 not yet come. A spell cast on the fierce mob opened a way for Him, and 
 He passed through them, and left the town unhurt. 
 
 This disastrous result so far exceeded all previous experience, that Jesus 
 Himself marvelled at their unbelief. It even fettered His action, for " He 
 could do no mighty work, save that He laid His hands upon a few sick, 
 and healed them." He exerted His miraculous power only towards those 
 in whom He found moral sympathy, however imperfect. The human will, 
 mysteriously independent, needed to meet His supernatural might, and 
 give it entrance; as if the soul, opposed or indifferent, were wayside soil, 
 on which the seeds of physical, as of moral blessing, fell without fruit. 
 
 But though He left Nazareth never to return. He remained in the neigh- 
 bourhood for a time, preaching in the villages of the great plain of
 
 DAEK AND BRIGHT. 461 
 
 Esdraelon, far and near. The whole theatre of His activity, hoAvcver, in 
 this circuit, as in previous ones, was limited beyond ordinary conception. 
 From north to south, between Chorazin, which lay beyond Capernaum and 
 Jezreel in the great plain, was only a distance of ten hours, and from east 
 to west, from Chorazin to Cana, or Nazareth, only six or seven. His whole 
 life was spent in a space represented by one or two English counties, but 
 the seed sown on this speck of ground is yet to cover the earth ! 
 
 The Apostles had now passed through a lengthened and varied expe- 
 rience, and besides the constant instruction of their Master's words and 
 life, had learned from their own hearts how great their moral deficiencies 
 still were. Their faint-heartcdness, irresoluteness, and want of faith, were 
 evident, and they were thus brought to that modest self-distrust which 
 alone could fit them for the heavier duties before them. They were now 
 to rise from the position of merely dependent followers and scholars, and 
 become co-workers with Jesus, and that not only on the good soil already 
 sown, but, also, on the hard trodden paths, the stony ground, and that 
 pre-occupied by thorns. In Gadara and Nazareth, they had learned to dis- 
 tinguish the ojDposite aspects of unbelief ; in the one, that of common 
 natural selfishness and harshness ; in the other, that of proud perverted 
 fanaticism. After long wanderings and continuous trials, the Twelve 
 were now, in their Master's opinion, in a measure prepared to work by 
 themselves in spreading the New Kingdom. In spite of the opposition of 
 the interested professional classes, the enthusiasm of the people to hear 
 the new teaching was unabated. Multitudes followed Jesus wherever He 
 appeared, the synagogues still offered access to the whole population each 
 Sabbath, and in all the cities and villages of Galilee, the " Gospel of the 
 Kingdom " was the great topic of conversation. 
 
 The times, moreover, were exciting. The whole country rang with the 
 story of a massacre of Galilteans by Pilate, at the last Feast of Tabernacles 
 — perhaps at the same tumult in which Joseph Barabbas was arrested as a 
 ringleader ; to be afterwards freed instead of Jesus. Pilate was always 
 ready to shed the blood of a people he hated, and the hot-headed Galilajans, 
 ever ready to take affront at the hated infidels, gave him only too many 
 excuses for violence. They had a standing grievance in the sacrifices 
 offered daily for the Empire and the Emperor, and at the presence of a 
 Roman garrison and Boman pickets at the Temple during the feasts, to 
 keep the peace, as Turkibh soldiers do at this day, during Easter, at the 
 Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But Pilate had given special offence, at 
 this time, by approj^riating joart of the treasures of the Temple, derived 
 mainly from dues voluntarily paid by all Jews, over the world, and 
 amounting to vast sums in the aggregate — to defray the cost of great 
 conduits he had begun for the better supply of Jerusalem with water. 
 Stirred up by the priests and Rabbis, the people had besieged Pilate's 
 residence when he came up to the city at the feast, and with loud con- 
 tinuous cries had demanded that the works be given up. Seditious words 
 against himself, the representative of the Emperor, had not been wanting. 
 He had more than once been forced to yield to such clamour, but this time 
 determined to put it down. Numbers of soldiers, in plain clothes, and
 
 462 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 armed only with clubs, surrounded the vast mob, and used their cudgels 
 so remorselessly that many, both of the innocent and guilty, were left dead * 
 on the spot. The very precincts of the Temple were invaded by the legion- 
 aries, and some pilgrims who were so poor that they were slaying their 
 own sacrifices, were struck down while doing so, their blood mingling with 
 that of the beasts they were preparing for the priests, and thus polluting 
 the House of God. It was an unprecedented outrage, and filled every 
 breast in Judea and Galilee with the wildest indignation, though such 
 brawls were of frequent occurrence. The excitement had even penetrated 
 the palace at Tiberias, and kindled bitter ill-feeling in Antipas towards 
 Pilate, for the men slain were Galila?an subjects. 
 
 Another misfortune had happened in Jerusalem a short time before. A 
 tower, apparently on the top of Ophel, near the Fountain of the Virgin, 
 opposite Siloam, had fallen — perhaps one of the buildings connected with 
 Pilate's public-spirited steps to bring w^ater to the Holy City — and eighteen 
 men had been buried beneath it; in the opinion of the jaeople, as a judg- 
 ment of God, for their having helped the sacrilegious undertaking. 
 
 The cry for a national rising to avenge the murdered pilgrims rose on 
 every side, but Jesus did not sanction it for a moment. He saw the arm 
 of God even in the hated Romans and in the fall of the tower, and, instead 
 of recognising special guilt in the sufferers, or joining in a cry for insur- 
 rection for the crime of Pilate, told His hearers that the same horrors 
 were like to fall on the whole nation. " Suppose ye," He asks, " that these 
 Galileans were sinners above all the Galiloaans, because they have suffered 
 such things ? I tell you nay ; but, except ye repent, ye shall all perish in 
 like manner. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and 
 killed them, sui^pose ye that they w^ere sinners above all the men that dwell 
 in Jerusalem p I tell you nay ; but, except ye repent, ye will all perish in 
 the same manner." " Israel," He added, " is like a fig-tree, planted by a 
 man in his vineyard, which year after year bore no fruit. Wearied by its 
 barrenness, the householder was determined to cut it down, and it vras 
 now spared at the intercession of the vine-dresser, only for another year, to 
 give it a last respite. After that, if it still bore no fruit, he would cut it 
 dovfn, as merely cumbering the ground. That year of merciful delay was 
 the passing moment of His own presence and work among them. The 
 nation had given itself up to a wild dream, that would end in its ruin. 
 Led by the priests and Rabbis, it trusted that God would appear on its 
 behalf, and, by a political revolution, overthrow the hated foreign domina- 
 tion. The fruits of repentance and faith which God required, were still 
 wanting. As the vine-dresser, Jesus had done all possible to win them 
 to a better frame. He had warned, besought, counselled ; but they were 
 wedded to their sins and their sinful pride. His peaceful kingdom offered 
 them the only escape from ruin, here and hereafter ; but, as a nation, they 
 were more and more leaning towards the worldly schemes of tlieir eccle- 
 siastical leaders, and turned a deaf ear to all proposals of spiritual self- 
 reform. Continuance in this course would bring the fate of those they 
 now lamented on the whole race. If they rejected Him, God would ere- 
 long destroy them as a people."
 
 DARK AND BRIGHT. 463 
 
 There was still another matter agitating all minds, and helping to keep 
 up the volcanic excitement of the country. John lay a prisoner in the 
 black fortress of Machaerus, almost within sight, and each day men won- 
 dered if Antipas had yet dared to put him to death. 
 
 Under any circumstances, the crowds following Jesus would have 
 touched a heart so tender ; but their wild despair and religious enthusiasm 
 made the sight of them doubly affecting. Might they not be won to the 
 peace and joy of the glad tidings ? They seemed to Him, the Good 
 Shepherd, like a great flock needing many shepherds, but with none ; 
 footsore with long travel, wandering they knew not whither, with no one 
 to lead them to the still waters and green pastures. " The harvest," said 
 He to His disciples, " is plenteous, but the labourers are few ; pray ye, 
 therefore, the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth labourers into 
 His harvest." There were multitudes to be won for the ISTew Kingdom — 
 multitudes prepared to hear ; for their spirits were broken under personal 
 and national sorrow. But the number of right teachers was small. 
 
 He decided, therefore, to delay no longer sending forth the Twelve. 
 Calling them together, He told them His purpose, and fitted them to 
 carry it out. As a proof of their mission from Him, He invested them 
 with authority over spirits, and gave them power to heal diseases. They 
 were to confine themselves for the present to Jewish districts, avoiding 
 Samaritan towns, and not turning their faces to heathen parts. Galilee 
 itself was thus virtually their field of labour, for idolatry had a footing in 
 every place round it, and within a few miles of thein lay Gadara, Hippos, 
 Pella, Scythopolis, and even Sepphoris, with heathen worship in their 
 midst. Judea and Jerusalem were not to be thought of. The simple 
 Galilfeans would be a better beginning for the Apostles than the dark 
 bigoted population of the south. One day they would be free to visit 
 Samaria, as He Himself had done already. Meanwhile they must not stir 
 up Jewish hatred l^y going to either Samaritans or heathen. Moreover, 
 their Jewish prejudices unfitted them for a mission to any but Jews, for 
 even after this, the first signs of hostility made John wish to call down 
 fire from heaven on a Saiuaritan village, and they could not as yet handle 
 aright the many questions such a journey would elicit. Besides, Israel 
 must have another year in which to bring forth fruit ; and withal, it was 
 their first independent journey. 
 
 The burden of their preaching was to be the repetition of that of John, 
 and of the earlier ministry of Jesus Himself. " The Kingdoin of Heaven 
 is at hand." Like John, they were heralds, to prepare the way. They 
 were to " Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons." 
 They had received their miraculous gifts freely, and must dispense them 
 as freely. Their equipment was to be of the simplest, for superfluity 
 would divert the mind from their great object, and give extra trouble, 
 which would only hinder them on their journeys. It became them, also, 
 by their humble guise, to disarm the suspicion of worldliness, and to show 
 their implicit trust in God. They were to take no money, not even any 
 copper coin, in their girdles, the usual Eastern purse ; nor a wallet for 
 their food by the way; nor two under-garments, but were to wear only
 
 464 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 one ; nor were thoy to have slioes, which looked like luxury, but only tlio 
 sandals of the common people, and they were to have only one staff. They 
 were to trust to hospitality for food and shelter, as the peasants of 
 Palestine often do even now ; offering in their simplicity a striking con- 
 trast to the flowing rol)es and bright colours of the population at large. 
 But they were not to go alone. Each must have a companion, to accustom 
 them to brotherly communion, to give counsel and help to each other in 
 difficulties, and to cheer each other on the way. We may fancy that Peter 
 was sent with Andrew, James with John, Philip with Bartholomew, the 
 grave Thomas with the practical Matthew, James the Small with Judas 
 the Brave-hearted, and Simon the Zealot with Judas Tscariot ; the brother 
 with the brother ; the friend with the friend ; the zealous with the cold. 
 
 No mention is made of the synagogues in their instructions ; it may be 
 because the Apostles were not yet confident enough to come forward so 
 publicly. It was to be a hoii^se to house mission. While every traveller, 
 according to the custom of the' country, greeted his acquaintances with 
 laborious formality, raising the hand from the heart to the forehead, and 
 then laying it in the right hand of the person met ; bowing thrice, or even 
 as many as seven times, according to circumstances ; they were forbidden 
 to indulge in any greetings by the way. Time was too precious, and their 
 mission too earnest, for empty courtesies. On entering a town or village, 
 they were to make inquiries, and thus avoid seeking hospitality from the 
 unworthy; bnt having once become guests, they were to stay in the same 
 family till they left the place. They were to enter the dwelling which 
 heartily welcomed them, with a prayer for its peace. Any house or city, 
 however, that refused to receive them, was to be treated openly as heathen, 
 by shaking off its dust from their feet as they left it. But woe to such as 
 brought down this wrath ; it would be better at the last day for Sodom 
 and Gomorrah than for the Galilgean village, in such a case ! 
 
 To these directions for the way, Jesus added warnings that might have 
 well filled with dismay men less devoted. He predicted for them only 
 persecution and universal hati'ed, jails, public whipping, and even death, 
 but cheered them by the promise that their brave and faithful confession 
 of faith in Him, before governors and kings, would serve His cause, and 
 that endurance to the end would secure their eternal salvation. They 
 would be like helpless sheep in the midst of treacherous wolves. Even 
 their work would be different from what they might expect. To-day it 
 was an olive-branch ; to-morrow it would be a sword. Instead of peace, it 
 would divide households and communities, and turn the closest relations 
 into deadly enemies. They would need to labour diligently, for before 
 they had gone over all the towns of Israel, He Himself would come to 
 their aid as the risen and glorified Messiah. They might expect slander, 
 for He Himself had been charged with being in league with the devil, and 
 they could not hope to fare better. They were, however, to be stout of 
 heart, for the Providence that watches the birds of the air would keep 
 them safe. He had nothing to offer in this world, but if they confessed 
 Him here He would confess them, in the great day, before His Father. 
 If, on the other hand, they denied Him, He would, on that day, deny them.
 
 DARK AND BRIGHT. 465 
 
 He frankly demanded a loyalty so supreme aud undivided, that the most 
 sacred claims of blood were to be subordinated to it. Instead of receiving 
 honours, He told them that they might expect to be crucified, as He would 
 be. To save this life by denying Him would be to lose the life to come ; 
 but to lose it by fidelity to Him, was to find life eternal. Amidst all this 
 dark anticipation, they need not fear for their bodily wants, for the greater 
 the danger braved, the greater woxild be the reward in His kingdom, to 
 those who showed them favour, and this would always secure them 
 friends. 
 
 Such an address, under such circumstances, was assuredly never given 
 before or since. To propose to found a kingdom by the services of men, 
 who, as their reward, Avould meet only shame, torture, and death ; to claim 
 from them an absolute devotion, from mere personal reverence and love, 
 with no prospects of reward except those of another world ; and despite 
 of the opposition of all the authority of the day, to launch an enterprise, 
 thus supported only by moral influences, simply that men might be won 
 to righteousness by the display of pure, unselfish devotion to their good, 
 astounds us by the sublime grandeur of the conception. 
 
 1^0 details are given of the mission, except that the Twelve went on a 
 lengthened circuit through the towns and villages of Galilee, preaching 
 the need of repentance, and the glad tidings of the IsTew Kingdom ; and 
 that their ministry was accompanied by miraculous works of mercy — the 
 casting out devils, and the anointing with oil many sick, and healing 
 them — which were themselves proofs of their higher success, since such 
 wonders were, doubtless, as in the case of their Master, wrought only 
 when there was a measure of faith. 
 
 How long this mission lasted is uncertain. It may have embraced 
 weeks, or have extended over months, though, as the first journey of the 
 Twelve, alone, it is not likely to have been very protracted. The success 
 must have been unusual, for, as they appeared, two by two, in the villages 
 of Galilee, the name of Jesus was on every tongue, and penetrated even 
 the gilded saloons of the hated Roman palace of Antipas, at Tiberias. 
 Jesus, Himself, had not been idle while His follovfers were away, for their 
 departure was the signal for a new, solitary journey, to preach and teach 
 in the various cities. His name was thus spread abroad everywhere, and 
 His claims and character discussed by all. He had been nearly two years 
 before the world, and had steadily risen in jDopular favour, in spite of the 
 hierarchical party. His claims had become the engrossing topic of the 
 day. Hitherto the most opposite views perplexed all alike. More than 
 all men, Antipas felt his eyes irresistibly fixed on Him, for his conscience 
 was ill at ease. He had at last put John to death, and, true to his super- 
 stitious and weak nature, concluded that Jesus was no other than the 
 murdered Baptist risen from the dead, clothed with the awful powers of 
 the invisible world. Since that dear head had fallen, the weak and crafty 
 worldling had hoped for peace and security, but an awful echo of the 
 voice he had silenced sounded louder and more terrible, from the lips of 
 Jesus, at his very doors. He was noAV again in Tiberias, and the wide 
 dispersion of a whole baud of preachers of the same apparently revolu- 
 
 H u
 
 468 • THE LIFE OF cmiiST. 
 
 tionary kingdom, in his immediate territory, seemed a designed defiance 
 of liis violence at Machaerus, and its counterstroke. It was certain tliat, 
 when he gained courage enough, he would try to repeat the murder of tho 
 first lorophet by that of the second. Suspicion and crafty foresight were 
 his characteristics. Jesus readily, however, learned all that jiassed 
 I'especting Himself in the palace, for He had followers in it, such as 
 Johanna, the wife of Chuza, and Menahem, the foster-brother of the 
 tetrarch, and He was on His guard. 
 
 While Antipas thus interpreted the rumours respecting Jesus, others 
 formed an opinion hardly more acute or thoughtful, who took Him for a 
 second Elijah. John and that prophet, in their whole spirit and work, 
 were men devoted to tho traditional outward theocracy: men who looked 
 to the past. Jesus, on the other hand, had proclaimed, even in His 
 consecration-sermon on the mount, that He devoted His life to the found- 
 ing a New Covenant. Their opinion was nearer the truth who believed 
 Him a prophet, though distance threw a mysterious glory round the pro- 
 phets of the past, which they failed to realize of one in their midst. 
 
 The news of the death of Jolm seems to have reached Jesus aboiit tlie 
 same time as the Apostles I'eturned, and must have seemed the prediction 
 of His own fate. The prospect of the Cross had been before His mind from 
 the first, for even at the Jordan He had been announced as tho Lamb of 
 God. The Sermon on the Mount had struck the key-note of self-sacrifice, 
 and He had once and again foretold, more or less clearly, that He knew 
 His path would be towards a violent death. It was inevitable that one 
 whom the interest, the pride, and the reputation of the existing ecclesias- 
 tical authorities combined to proscribe, must fall before their hostility. 
 Even the prophets, as a rule, had suffered violent deaths, though their 
 protest against the corruption of their day involved no condemnation of 
 the religious economy of the nation. But He had committed Himself 
 deliberately to principles fatal to the theocracy ; for He had violated tra- 
 dition, He had eaten with publicans, and He had denounced the leaders of 
 the people as hypocrites, Ijlind, and wicked. It was a life and death matter 
 for the hierarchical party to try to quench in His own blood the fire He 
 had kindled. 
 
 The meeting with the Apostles was pei-haps pre-arranged, and Jesus 
 returned to the neighbourhood of Capernaum, or, perhaps, of Tiberias, to 
 effect it. Ho had been away for a length of time, and His absence had 
 evidently been deeply felt, for multitudes at once gathered round Him 
 again, as soon as He re-appeared. Every village, far and near, poured out 
 its population to hear Him once more, and the throng was increased by 
 the countless passing bands of pilgrims to the Feast at Jerusalem, for 
 Passover was near at hand. He needed rest, and there was much to hear 
 from the Twelve, but it was impossible to have either the rest or the quiet 
 intercourse amidst such crowds. They had no leisure even to eat. It 
 was, moreover, no longer safe for Him to be in the territories of Antipas. 
 Taking the Twelve with Him, therefore. He crossed over to the tetrarchy 
 of Philip, at the head of the lake, going by water, and landing at the plain 
 of Batiha, under the shadow of Bethsaida, or Juliasy where He could hope
 
 DARK AND IJIIIGHT. 467 
 
 for privacy, and secure a safe retreat iu the quiet glens, with their rich 
 green slopes, passing gradually into the marshes round the entrance of 
 the Jordan into the lake. 
 
 But it was vain to hope for escape. Some had seen Him put off, and 
 watched the direction of the boat till they saw that He was making for 
 Batiha, which was known as one of His resorts. It was only sis miles 
 across the water from Capernaum. The news soon spread, and crowds of 
 those most anxious to see and hear Him set out by land for the spot. The 
 distance was farther than by water, but they ran afoot, out of all the vil- 
 lages, and were waiting for Him when He arrived. He had come for rest» 
 but it was denied Him now, as at other times. Looking up as the boat 
 touched the shore, the slopes were alive with multitudes, who showed 
 by their very presence, that they felt themselves like sheep without a 
 shepherd. The evil times, the restless uneasiness of all, the high religious 
 excitement, the darkness of their spiritual condition, and the deep misery 
 of their national prospects, combined to touch His soul with pity. They 
 had brought all the sick who could be carried, or who could come, and as 
 He passed through the crowds Ho healed them Ijy a word or touch. They 
 had greater wants, however, than bodily healing, and He could not let 
 them go away uncomforted. Ascending the hill-side, and gathering the 
 vast throng before Him, He " spake unto them of the kingdom of God, and 
 taught them many things." 
 
 The day was spent in this arduous labour, but the people still lingered. 
 They had been fed with the bread of truth, and seemed indifferent, for the 
 time, to anything besides. Poor shcpherdlcss sheejo ; it was His delight, 
 as the Good Shepherd, to lead them to rich pastures, and as they sat and 
 stood round Him, they forgot their bodily wants in the beauty and power 
 of His words. 
 
 It was now towards evening, and the company showed no signs of dis- 
 persing. Food could not be had in that lonely place, and the Twelve, 
 afraid on this and perhaps other grounds, anxiously urged Jesus to send 
 them away, that they might buy bread in the country round. To their 
 astonishment, however. Ho told them that the crowd must be fed ; it would 
 never do to dismiss them hungry ; they might faint by the way. No 
 more impossible a request could have been made. Between thirty and 
 forty pounds' worth of bread, at the value of money in those days, would 
 be needed to give each an insufficient share. The Apostles could not 
 understand Him. Andrew, pei-haps the provider for the band, could only 
 demonstrate their helplessness by saying that the lad in attendance on 
 them had no naore than five loaves of common barley bread — the food of 
 the poor — and two small fishes, but what, he added, were they among so 
 many ? 
 
 " Make the men sit down," said Jesus. It was in Nisan, " the month of 
 flowers," and the slopes were rich with the soft green of the spring grass 
 — that simplest and most touching lesson of the care of God for all nature. 
 The Twelve presently divided the vast multitude into companies of fifties 
 and hundreds, reminding St. Peter, long after, from the bi'ight colours of 
 their Eastern dresses, of the flower-beds of a great garden.
 
 468 THE LIFE OF CUEIST. 
 
 This done, like the great Father of the far-stretching household, Jcsua 
 took the bread and the fishes, and looking up to Heaven, invoked the 
 blessing of God on their use, and giving thanks for them, as was custom- 
 ary before all meals, proceeded to hand portions to the disciples, Avho, in 
 turn, gave them to the crowd. Elisha had once fed a hundred men with 
 twenty loaves, and increased the oil in the widow's cruse, and Elijah had 
 made the meal and the oil of the widow of Sarcpta endure till the Lord 
 sent rain on the earth. But Christ, from five loaves and two small fishes, 
 not only satisfied the hunger of five thousand men, besides women and 
 children, but did it so royally that the fragments that remained were 
 enough to fill twelve of the little baskets in which Passover pilgrims and 
 other Jews were wont to carry their provisions for the way. More was 
 left than there had been at first ! 
 
 Jesus had thus supplied the wants of the needy, in a way the full signi- 
 ficance of which was as yet far beyond what the disciples either under- 
 stood or dreamed, for He had shown how there dwelt in Him a virtue 
 sufiicicnt to meet all higlier wants, as well as the lower, so that none who 
 believed in Him would ever have either hunger or thirst of soul any longer, 
 but would find in Him their all. Had they known it. He had shown them 
 that He Himself was the Bread of Life, that came down from Heaven. 
 But they at least know how much they came short of a lofty faith, which, 
 in loving trust, despairs least when the need is greatest, and in the 
 strength of which all is doubled by joyful imparting, while abundance 
 remains instead of want. 
 
 The effect on the multitude was in keeping with the ideas of the time. 
 Murmurs ran tlu'ough the excited throng, that Jesus must be the expected 
 prophet— the Messiah. Like Moses, He had fed Israel by a miracle, in 
 the wilderness, which the Ealjbis said the Messiah would do. Surely He 
 would manifest Himself now, if they put Him at their head ? They had 
 no higher idea of the Messianic kingdom than the outward and political, 
 and would hasten its advent by forcing Him, if possible, to proclaim Him- 
 self King, and thus open the longed-for war with the hated Eomans, in 
 which God would ajipear on their behalf. 
 
 Material power, not moral preparation, was the national conception of 
 the path to the Messianic triumph. The Rabbis and the people had de- 
 cided for themselves the way in which the salvation of Israel was to show 
 itself, but between their views and those of Jesus there was a great gulf. 
 He Avould not use force, and they were bent on it. His refusal to carry 
 out their plan made opposition inevitable, and it necessarily grew deeper 
 each day as that refusal became more clearly final. 
 
 While visions of national splendour dazzled the thoughts of his country- 
 men, the ideal of greatness for Himself and them lay, with Jesus, in 
 humiliation. His path was in the lowly valleys, not on the high places of 
 the earth. He aimed only to find the humble and needy, to seek the lost, 
 to serve rather than to be served. Hiding His glory in outward lowliness, 
 and never seeking honour from men. He had, throughout, identified His 
 will with that of God, with a self-restraint which showed the grandest 
 force of will. The outward and material were indifferent to Him, and
 
 DAEK AND BRIGHT. 469 
 
 utterly opposed to the Divine purpose, if made an aim in connection with 
 His work. The reign of God in His own soul was the perfect realization 
 of the only kingdom He sought to found in the souls of men at large, and 
 it had nothing in common with the vulgar parade of an earthly royalty. 
 
 As soon, therefore, as He perceived the design of the crowd to force 
 Him to act as their leader, and to instal Him at Jerusalem at the head of 
 a national insurrection. He hurriedly left them, and went into the bosom 
 of the hills, beyond their reach. But His having declined to be led by 
 them to the throne of David, in their way, was, in reality, a step towards 
 the Cross. The very proposal was a fore-shadowing of His final rejection 
 and violent death. The solitude of the mountains was His fittest retreat, 
 to strengthen Himself against this new assault of the temptation He had 
 so often repelled, and to gird up His soul for the trials that lay in His 
 path. 
 
 At the first signs of tumult among the people. He had sent off the 
 Twelve to cross the lake again at once, to the Bethsaida near Capernaum, 
 while He dismissed the multitudes. They had waited for Him till night 
 fell, Init, at last, as He did not come, they set off without Him. As they 
 rowed, however, a sudden squall, blowing every way, struck down on the 
 lake from the hills around, and caught their boat. It was the last watch 
 of the night— between three and six o'clock in the wild morning, and the 
 weary boatmen had been toiling at their oars through the long night, but 
 though the whole distance to be rowed was only six miles, a third of the 
 way was still before them. Jesus was not with them to still the wind, and 
 their own strength and skill had availed little. But suddenly, close to 
 the boat, they saw through the gleam of the water and the broken light of 
 the stars, a human form walking on the sea. The sight, which would 
 have troubled men less superstitious than simple fishermen, made them 
 cry out in their terror. But it was only momentary, for close at hand, so 
 that it was heard above the wind and the waves, came the words, " Be of 
 good cheer ; it is I : be not afraid," in a voice which they knew was that 
 of Jesus. Always impulsive, the warm-hearted Peter could not wait till 
 the Delivei'er came among them. " Would not his Master suffer him to 
 come to Him on the water ? " Then followed that touching incident 
 which has supplied a lesson for all ages; the safe footing on the waves 
 while the Apostle kept his eyes fixed on his Lord, and the instant sinking 
 Avhen his faith gave away — an image of his whole nature, and of all his 
 future life. But the saving hand was near, and with the gentle rebuke, 
 " O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt ? " they were in the 
 boat, and as they entered, the wind ceased, so that, presently, with easy 
 sweeps, their oars carried them to the shore. 
 
 Like the mass of men, the Twelve vrere slow at reasoning, or applying 
 broadly the plainest lesson. Had they realized the greatness of the 
 miracle they had seen the day before, even the walking on the sea, and the 
 calming of the wind, would have seemed only what they might have ex- 
 pected. But their minds were dull and unreflecting, and their amazement 
 knew no bounds. It is the characteristic of the uneducated, that they 
 think without continuity, and forthwith relapse into stolid listlessness
 
 470 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 after the strongest excitement. The miracle of the loaves had ceased to 
 be a wonder, for it was some hours old. But this new illustration of the 
 superhuman power of their Master was so transcendent, that their wonder 
 passed into worship. The impression, like many before, might soon lose 
 its force; but for the'moment they were so awed that, approaching Him, 
 they kneeled in lowliest reverence, and, through Peter, ever their spokes- 
 man, paid Him homage in words then first heard from human lips—" Of 
 a truth Thou ai't the Son of God." 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. 
 
 THE TTJUN OF THE DAT. 
 
 WHEN day broke on the scene of the miraculous meal of the evening 
 before, a nuiiiber who had slept in the open air, throiigh the warm 
 spring night, still remained on the spot. They had noticed that Jesus did 
 not cross with the Twelve, and fancied that He was still on their side of 
 the lake. Meanwhile, a number of the boats which usually carried over 
 wood or other commodities, from these eastern districts, had come from 
 Tiberias ; blown roughly on their way by the same wind that had been 
 against the disciples. In these, many, finding that Jesus had left the neigh- 
 bourhood, took passage, and came to Capernaum, seeking for Him. It 
 was one of the daj's of synagogue worship — Monday or Thursday— and 
 they met Him on His way to the synagogue, to which they, forthwith, 
 eagerly pressed. Excitement was at its height. News of His arrival had 
 spread far and near,, and His way was hindered by crowds, who had, as 
 usual, brought their sick to the streets through which He was passing, in 
 hope of His healing them. 
 
 The incidents of the preceding day might well have raised desires for 
 the higher spiritual food which even the Rabbis taught them to expect 
 from the Messiah. But they felt nothing higher than vulgar wonder, and 
 came after Jesus in hopes of further advantages of the same kind, and, 
 above all, that they would still find in Hun a second Judas the Gaulonite, 
 to lead them against the Romans. A few, doubtless, had worthier thoughts ; 
 bnt, with the mass, the Messiah's earthly kingdom was to be as gross as 
 Mahomet's paradise. They were to be gathered together into the garden of 
 Eden, to eat and drink, and satisfy themselves all their days, with houses 
 of precious stones, beds of silk, and rivers flowing with wine and spicy 
 oil. It was that He might gain this for them that they had wished to 
 set Him up as king. 
 
 Feeling how utterly He and they were at variance, Jesus resolved to 
 enter into no irrelevant conversation with them, and waiving aside a 
 question as to His crossing the lake, at once pointed out their misappren- 
 hension respecting Himself, and urged them not to set their hearts on the 
 perishable food of the body, but to seek earnestly for that food of the soul 
 which secures eternal life. So long as they did not crave this beyond all 
 things else, they missed their highest advantage. As the Son of man
 
 THE TURN OF THE DAY. 471 
 
 — the Messiah— accredited from God the Ftvther by His wondrous works, 
 He was apppinted to give them this heavenly food, and would do so if 
 they showed a sincere desire for it by becoming His disciples. 
 
 The Eabbis were accustomed to teach by metaphors, and the people saw 
 at once that He alluded to some religious duty. What it was, however, 
 they did not understand, but fancied He referred to some special works 
 appointed by God. As Jews, they had been ijainfuUy keeping all the 
 Eabbinical precepts, to secure so much the richer an inheritance under 
 the Messiah. Yet, if Jesus had some additional injunctions, they were 
 willing to add them to the rest, that they might still further strengthen 
 their claim for favour in the New Kingdom of God. But, instead of multi- 
 plied observances, He startled them by announcing that citizenship in the 
 K'ew Theocracy required no more than their believing in Him, as sent 
 from the Father. In this lay all, for the manifold " works of God " would 
 spring naturally from it. 
 
 Those of the crowd around who had not seen the miracle of the previous 
 day had, doubtless, ere this, heard of it. It had been an amazing proof of 
 supernatural power, but their craving for wonders demanded something 
 still more astounding, as a justification of Christ's claim to be "the Sent 
 of the Father." A voice, perhaps that of some open opponent — for the 
 Eabbis had taken cai*e to be present — therefore broke in, apparently hal f 
 mocking, with the question, " What ' sign ' He had to show, tliat they 
 might see it, and believe Him ? Moses proved his authority by stupendous 
 'signs.' What sign worthy the name do you show, to prove j'our right to 
 introduce new laws, in addition to his, or in their room? Our fathers ate 
 manna in the wilderness, as it is written, 'He gave them bread from 
 heaven to eat.' What voucher as great as this do you offer ? " 
 
 The miracle of the manna had become a subject of the ]3roudest remem- 
 brances and fondest legends of the nation. '• God," says the Talmud, "made 
 manna to descend for them, in which Avere all manner of tastes. Every 
 Israelite found in it what best pleased him. The young tasted bread, the 
 old honey, and the children oil." It had even become a fixed belief that 
 the Messiah, when He came, would signalize His advent by a repetition 
 of this stupendous wonder. " As the first Saviour — the deliverer from 
 Egyptian bondage," said the Eabbis, "caused manna to fall for Israel from 
 heaven, so the second Saviour — the Messiah — will also cause manna to 
 descend for them once more, for it is written, ' There will be abundance 
 of corn in the land.' " Moses had gradually been half deified. It was 
 taught that God counted him of as mucli value as all Israel. Most be- 
 lieved that he was five grades in knowledge above all creatures, even 
 angels. The lower part of the body was human ; the upper Divine. On 
 his entrance to paradise, God left the upper heavens and came to him, 
 and the angels also came and ministered to him, and sang hymns before 
 him. Even the sun, the moon, and the stars came, and craved liberty 
 from him to shine on the world, which they could not have done had he 
 refused. 
 
 It was thus only an expression of the public feeling of the day when 
 Jesus was asked to repeat the descent of manna — the greatest of the
 
 472 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 miracles of Moses. It is in Imman nature, but above all, in Eastern 
 human nature, to associate high office and dignity with display and out- 
 ward circumstance, and hence what must have been the popular expecta- 
 tions of external grandeur and majesty in the Messiah, when they saw 
 a demigod in Moses, Avhom Ho was to resemble ? ISTo demand for over- 
 powering " signs " of the Divine ajoproval of a claim to be the Messiah 
 could, in this point of view, be too great, from One whose outward 
 appearance, and Avliole life, in other respects, so entirely contradicted 
 the general Messianic anticipations. 
 
 But Jesus, at all times resolute in withholding miraculous action for 
 any personal end, had no thought of satisfying their craving for wonders. 
 " Moses indeed," said He, " gave yon manna, but it was not the true Bread 
 of Heaven." He wished to draw them from the merely outward miracle 
 to that far higher marvel, even then enacting before their eyes, the free 
 offer of the true Bread of Heaven, in the offer of Himself as their Saviour. 
 The manna, He implied, could only by a figure be called bread of heaven, 
 for it was material and perishable, and the heaven from which it fell was 
 only the visible sky, not that in which God dwells. Moses gave what was 
 called by a figure, " Bread of Heaven," but the true Bread of Heaven only 
 His Father could give, and He was giving it now. That alone can be 
 the true Bread of God, which comes down from the highest heaven — He 
 might have said, from the pure heaven of His own soul — and gives life 
 to the world ; for with Jesus, those who had not this bread were spiri- 
 tually dead. 
 
 "Master," cried many voices, "give us this bread henceforth, for life." 
 Like Ponce de Leon, with the spring of Unfading Youth, in Florida, they 
 thought that the new gift would literally make them immortal, and eagerly 
 clamoured to have a boon so far in advance of the mere barley loaves of 
 the day before. 
 
 " I am the Bread of Life," replied Jesus ; in a moment scattering to the 
 winds their visions of material plenty and endless natural life. Then, 
 explaining Himself, He added, " He that comes to me shall never hunger, 
 and he that believes on me shall never thirst. But, as I said a moment 
 ago, you. have not only heard of me, but have also seen me, and been eye- 
 witnesses of my deeds as the Messiah, and yet you do not believe. All 
 whom the Father gives me will come to me. You may resist my invita- 
 tions or yield, but he who resists is not given me by my Father. Believe 
 me no hungei-ing and thirsting soul that comes to me will I cast out of 
 my Kingdom when it is erected. How could I, indeed, when I have come 
 down from heaven, not to act on my own human will, but only to carry 
 out the will of my Father in Heaven, which is, in this matter, that of all 
 whom He has given me — not Jews alone, but all, without exception — I 
 should lose none, but should raise them up at the last day ; or, in other 
 words, should give them eternal life." 
 
 These words, spoken in the synagogue at Capernaum, created a gi'eat 
 sensation. The congregation, comprising some Eabbis and other enemies, 
 had, from time to time, in Jewish fashion, freely expressed their feelings, 
 and had taken such offence at His claim to be the Bread that came down
 
 THE TUEN OF THE DAT. 473 
 
 from hoavon, that their whispers and murmui^ now ran through the whole 
 bnikling. " How can He say He has come down from heaven ? We know 
 His father and mother. He is from ISTazaveth, and wouUl have vis believe 
 He is from God above. He is mad. He has a devil. When the Messiah, 
 comes, no one will know whence He is." 
 
 " Do not murmur among yourselves," said Jesus. " Natural sense is 
 worth nothing in this matter ; it will never help you to understand how 
 I am tlie True Bread come down from heaven. If you wish to know how 
 I can say so, you must submit yourselves to the teaching and influence of 
 God: must hear and learn what God says, for He tells us in the prophets^ 
 ' They shall be all taught of God.' Only those thus taught come to me 
 or believe in mo. The yielding your souls to God, and your rising thus 
 to communion with Him by spiritual oneness, can alone lead to the faith 
 that recognises the truth respecting me." 
 
 " Perhaps you think," He continued, to paraphrase His words, " that to 
 hear and learn of God, you must yourselves see Him, or commune directly 
 with Him ! If so, you greatly err. To see God immediately, face to face, 
 is given to no mortal man, buj only to Him who is from God. ISTo one but 
 His onlj'-begotten Son, who was in heaven and has come down thence, 
 has seen, and now sees, the Father, and reveals Him to man. Him, 
 therefore, the Son — that is. Me — must you hear; from Me must you learn, 
 if you would hear and learn from God. Amen, amen, I say to you. He 
 that believes on me as, thus, the ' Word ' and Revealer of the Father, has 
 everlasting life. I myself am, as such, that Bread of Life of which I have 
 spoken. Your forefathers ate the manna which Moses gave in the wilder- 
 ness, and died ; but it is the grand virtue of the true Bread of Heaven, that 
 if a man eat of it — that is, if he receive my words into his soul — he shall 
 not die, but shall have everlasting life." 
 
 " I am not only the Life-giving Bread," He added, " but the Living 
 Bread, and as all that is living communicates life, so whoever eats this 
 true Bread of Heaven, that is, whoever believes in me, shall live for ever. 
 As the Living Bread I will give myself— my flesh— that is, my life— for 
 the life of the world." 
 
 He pointed thus — in language which His hearers could have readily 
 understood, had their minds not been blinded by opposite preconceptions 
 — to His death as the " Lamb of God," for mankind. This, He imi3lied, 
 must above all be received, to secure everlasting life, for so, only, could 
 His claims and authority be felt. He would give His life for the spiritual 
 life of men, as bread is given for their bodily life ; the one to be taken 
 by the soul, the other by the body. 
 
 The idea of eating, as a metaphor for receiving sjoiritual benefit, was 
 familiar to Clirist's hearers, and was as readily understood as our expres- 
 sions of " devouring a book," or " drinking in " instruction. In Isaiah iii. 
 1, the words "the whole stay of bread," were explained by the Eabbis 
 as referring to their own teaching, and they laid it down as a rule, that 
 wherever, in Ecclesiastes, allusion was made to food or drink, it meant 
 study of the Law, and the practice of good works. It was a saying 
 among them — " In the time of the Messiah the Israelites will be fed by
 
 474 
 
 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 Him." NotLlng was more common in the schools and synagognes than 
 the phrases of eating and drinking, in a metaphorical sense. " Messiah 
 is not likely to come to Israel," said Hillel, " for they have already eaten 
 Him " — that is, greedily received His words—" in the days of Hezekiah." 
 A current conventionalism in the synagogues was that the just would 
 " eat the Shechinah." It was peculiar to the Jews to he taught in such 
 metaphorical language. Their Kabbis never spoke in Tplain words, and it 
 is expressly said that Jesus submitted to the popular taste, for " without a 
 parable spake He not unto them." 
 
 But nothing blinds the mind so much as preconceived ideas ; and dreams 
 of national glory had so inseparably associated themselves with their con- 
 ception of the Messiah, that a figure, which in other cases would have 
 created no difficulty, led to violent discussion, some contending for the 
 literal sense, which they held as a self-contradiction, others favouring a 
 metaphorical explanation. 
 
 Instead, however, of answering the eager questions which now rose, 
 how this could be, Jesus — resolved to break finally with the gross out- 
 ward ideas of His kingdom which prevailed — proceeded to carry out the 
 paradox further, by adding that they must not only eat His flesh, but 
 drink His blood — thus intimating still more clearly His violent death and 
 its mysterious virtue for the salvation of mankind, as He was hereafter to 
 do still more vividly hj the abiding symbols of the Last Supper. On no 
 other condition than by making the lessons and merits of that death their 
 own, could they have ctei-nal life, or be raised up at the last day. Without 
 this they were spiritually dead. His flesh and blood were true spiritual 
 food: the heavenly bi'ead of the soul, the nourishment of the Divine life 
 within. The hearty recognition and reception of this great truth would 
 create an abiding and intimate communion between Him and those who 
 thus, as it were, fed on Him as their inner life. Living in Him, He would 
 live and reign in them. ISTay, as a further result of this intimate spiritual 
 union, this oneness of will and heart with Him, Divine life would go forth 
 from Him to those in Avhom He found it, as it came forth to Himself from 
 the Father. Then, with a repetition of the original figure of His being 
 the Bread that came down from heaven — not the manna, of which those 
 who ate were long since dead, but the bread, to eat which gave eternal 
 life — He closed His address. 
 
 The Baptist had spoken of the fan in the hand of his great successor : 
 this discourse was the realization of the figure. Those who had hoped to 
 find a popular political leader in Christ saw their dreams melt away ; 
 those who had no true sympathy for His life and words had an excuse for 
 leaving Him. None but those bound to Him by sincci-e loyalty and devo- 
 tion had any longer a motive for following Him. Fierce j^atriotism burning 
 for insurrection, mean self-iiaterest seeking worldly advantage, and vulgar 
 curiosity craving excitement, were equally disappointed. It was the first 
 vivid instance of " the offence of the Cross " — henceforth to become the 
 special stumbling-block of the nation. The wishes and hopes of the 
 crowds who had called themselves disciples had proved self-deceptions. 
 They expected from the Messiah quite other favours than the identity of
 
 THE TURN OF THE DAY. 475 
 
 f piritual nature symbolized by eating His flesh and drinking His blood. 
 The violent death implied in the metaphor was in dii-ect contradiction to 
 all their ideas. A lowly and suffering Messiah thus unmistakably set 
 Ijefore them was revolting to their national pride and gross material 
 tastes. " We have heard out of the Law," said some, a little later, " that 
 the Christ abidcth for ever, and how sayest thou, the Son of man must be 
 ' lifted up,' — that is crucified ! " " That be far from Thee, Lord ; this shall 
 not be unto Thee," said even Peter, almost at the last, when he heard of 
 the Cross, so near at hand, from his Master's lips. The Messiah of popular 
 conception would use force to establish His kingdom, but Jesus, while 
 claiming the Messiahship, spoke only of self-sacrifice. Outward glory and 
 material wealth were the national dream ; He spoke only of inward purity. 
 If He would not help them with His Almighty power, to get Judea for the 
 nation, they would not have Him, Their idea of the kingdom of God was 
 the exact opposite of His. 
 
 The discourse had been interrupted in its progress, and now at its close, 
 the murmuring and whispering grew more earnest than ever. " This is 
 a hard saying," was the general feeling, "who can bear it ?" "ISToono 
 could submit to such self-denial," said one. " I don't understand it," sai 1 
 another. " Blasphemy," said a third. " He claims to be God." " He is 
 not the ^Messiah for me," said a fourtli. Jesus, now on His way out of the 
 synagogue, noticed all. "Does what I have said offend you?" said He, 
 " If, now, while I am with you, you think my words hard and stumble at 
 them, what will you say when I tell you that when I have returned to 
 heaven, whence I came, you will still have to eat my flesh and drink my 
 blood, if you would become jDartakers of eternal life ? Do you not see 
 from this that I speak in metaphor, and that you are not to take mj^ words 
 literally, but in their spirit and inner meaning ? It is not my flesh you 
 are to eat, but my words, which you have just heard. These you must 
 receive into your hearts, and they will f|uicken you into spiritual life, for 
 they are spirit and life. If you do not believe on me as the true Messiah, 
 by His death the life of the world ; but expect only a national salvation 
 from my visible bodily presence, as one who will live on earth for ever, 
 and reign in deathless splendour, you must find what I have said, an 
 offence. But he who desires from me, as the Messiah, only the hidden 
 life of the soul, its renewal in the holy image of God, and His reign 
 within, will find no offence in any of my words. The truths I have told 
 you are spirit and life, and quicken the soul that receives them into a 
 heavenly life, as bread quickens the body. My mere outward natural life, 
 as such, profits you nothing. If my words have been hard to any, it is 
 because they do not believe in me, for only the believing heart can realize 
 their truth." 
 
 In the Sermon on the Mount, which inaugurated His public ministry, 
 Jesus had contrasted the theocratic forms of pupilage and the letter, with 
 the law of the New Kingdom ; a law of the spirit and of liberty. In this 
 address to the people He contrasted with the theocratic life in its mei'e 
 outwardness and its slavery to forms, the new life from God which He 
 made known, a life kindled and maintained l)y the Spirit from above, the
 
 47G THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 gift of the Heavenly Fatlier. The dead letter, the outward material flesh, 
 He told them, profited nothing ; the form, the lite, the dogma, the institu- 
 tion, however venerable in itself — even His own flesh, as the symbol of 
 mere material life — had no magic virtue. Only the inward essence, the 
 truth embodied, the living principle, the quickening spirit received into 
 the heart, availed with God, or sustained the heavenly life in the soul. 
 The life-giving Spirit, as it flows from the infinite fulness of God, and 
 reproduces itself in the heart, was the true manna of humanity in the 
 wilderness of the world. 
 
 The false enthusiasm which had hitherto gathered the masses round 
 Jesus was henceforth at an end, now that their worldly hopes of Him as 
 the Messiah were exploded. His discourse had finally undeceived them. 
 He was founding a mysterious spiritual kingdom ; they only cared for a 
 kingdom of this world. It became for the first time clear that no worldly 
 rewards or honours were to be had by following Him, but only spiritual 
 gifts and benefits, for which most of them cared nothing. They wanted 
 to see wonders, to eat bread from heaven that would protect them from 
 dying, and to get places and wealth in the new kingdom when finally set 
 up. They had looked on Jesus more as a miracle-worker than a spiritual 
 Saviour, and wished to be healed rather bj^ touching His garments than 
 by sympathy and communion with His Spirit. But He liad come to save 
 sinners, not to work mii'acles, even of healing ; to be a physician of souls, 
 not of bodies. He had disenchanted the insincere and selfish who had 
 hitherto flocked after Him, and they forthwith showed their altered feel- 
 ings. From the moment of this address, the crowds that had thronged 
 Him begaji to disappeai', returning to their homes, doubtless in angry 
 disappointment. It seemed as if He would be entirely forsaken. Could 
 it be that even the Twelve would leave Him ? He knew them too thoroughly 
 to look for any answer but an earnest assurance of their loyalty. Yet it 
 was well to put them to the test, and strengthen their faith by trying it. 
 " Do j'ou, also, wish to leave me ?" asked He. " To whom, Lord, shall we 
 go away?" answei^ed Peter, ever the first to speak, — " Tliou hast words of 
 eternal life, and we have believed and known that Thou art the Holy One 
 of God." But even among the Twelve, as Jesus knew, the fan had chaff 
 to separate from the wheat. " Did not I myself choose you Twelve to be 
 specially my own, and one even of you is a devil ? Beware of self-confi- 
 dence. If you think you stand, take heed lest you fall !" Eleven, as we 
 know, refused to leave Him. Did the first thought of treachery rise in the 
 mind of Judas with the blasting of worldly hopes entertained, almost 
 unconsciously, till now ? His Master had never before spoken so ])lainly. 
 Henceforth, to follow Him clearly meant to give up all worldly aims or 
 prospects, and voluntarily choose a life, and it might be a death, of self- 
 denial and self-sacrifice for the nation and the world — or act the hypocrite 
 with a faint hope of ulterior advantage. 
 
 Jesus had not gone to the Passover, for it would have been unsafe to 
 have shown Himself in Jerusalem. His disciples, however, doubtless went 
 up, for no Jew neglected to do so, if possible. He had now^ been publicly 
 teacliing in Galilee for some months over a year, and had not revisited
 
 TUB TUllN OP THE DAY. 477 
 
 Judea, except for a few days at the Passover before, since His first dis- 
 couraging circuit in the south. The nortli had received Him with a 
 warmth and frankness that had won His heart by the contrast with the 
 cold self-righteous bigotry of Judea. It had given Him the Twelve, and 
 the ready audience He had found had enabled Him to make a small but 
 healthy beginning of the New Kingdom. The imjjulsive, excitable Gali- 
 l;Kans seemed for a time, indeed, likely almost as a whole, to leave the 
 llabbis for His new teaching. But the movement had been checked, and 
 the popular favour chilled by the restless efforts of the party threatened. 
 "W^'cak in the north, they had sent word to Jerusalem of the success of the 
 Teacher from Nazareth, whom the orthodoxy of Judea had refused to 
 follow. The Rabbis of the capital — known variously as " the Pharisees," 
 " Scribes," or Soplierim, " lawyers," " masters of the traditions," " Haka- 
 min, or wise men," " doctors," " expounders of the Law," and " disputers," 
 of the Gospels and the Epistles; and the official ecclesiastical world at 
 large, the priests, canonists, and preachers of Judaism, had their stronghold 
 in the Temple courts, and rivalled the bigotry of the more modern Mollahs 
 and Softas of Mecca and Medina. At the first hint of danger, a deiDutation 
 had been sent to Capernaum, but they had failed to carry the people Avith 
 them in their attempts to fix charges on the ncAV Teacher. He had de- 
 fended Himself so dexterously against their allegations of Sabbath-break- 
 ing and blasphemy, that for the time they retired discomfited. Fresh 
 news from the north, however, had again roused them. More Eabbis 
 appeared, sent by the authorities in Jerusalem, to see if the rash Inno- 
 vator could not be crushed, and their presence speedily led to a further 
 conflict. 
 
 In the training of the Twelve for their future work, it was necessary, 
 above all things, to create and foster the conception of moral freedom; for 
 the central point in the contrast between the New Kingdom and the old 
 Theocracy w^as the liljerty of the former as opposed to the bondage to the 
 letter that had prevailed. The deep and pure religiousness Christ de- 
 manded coul-d only flourish where the conscience was ciuickened, and made 
 responsible by a sense of perfect sj^iritual freedom. He had already an- 
 nounced this great princij^le in the Sermon on the Mount. The Twelve 
 had been disciplined in it by their mission journeys, but new illustrations 
 daily showed how hard it was for them to emancipate themselves from 
 hereditary prejudices, and from Rabbinical authority. 
 
 The very foundation of the new Society was in itself a breaking away 
 from the established Theocracy, and it necessarily led to continually more 
 decisive acts of independence and separation. The Jewish theologians of 
 the Pharisaic party, with their pedantic devotion to precedent and form, 
 and their claim to direct the conscience of the people, had to a great extent 
 produced a mere outward religionism, which had weakened the moral 
 sense of the nation, and withered up all aspirations for sioiritual manhood 
 and liberty of thought. They had Ijcen very popular for generations past, 
 as the reverend and zealous defenders of the holy Law handed down from 
 the Fathers. They had recognised in Jesus, still more than in His hated 
 ^nd feared predecessor the Baptist, a deadly foe, and the success o£ the
 
 d78 THE LIL'E OE CHKIST. 
 
 new tcacliing iu Galilee imperilled tlieir influence if it remained unchecked. 
 Witli keen foresight they had sought to anticipate the danger, l)ut hitherto 
 had failed so ignominiously that they had for some time past refrained 
 from open attack, contenting themselves with a secret hostility of dark 
 hints, suspicions and blasphemies, to poison the minds of the people. Till 
 now, however, Jesus had refrained from turning on them, but, while 
 watched and assailed, had kept strictly on the defensive. Henceforth He 
 took a different course. To expose their innuendoes and calumnies was no 
 lonijer enouG;h. He felt constrained, for the future, to show that not He 
 but His accusers vv^ere really obnoxious to the charges made against Him 
 so recklessly ; that not He, but they, were leading the people from the 
 right way, and acting under unholy influence, and that their zeal for God 
 was blind, not His. 
 
 A new attack by them led to this change. Reports of the popular readi- 
 ness to accept Him as Messianic King, and of His resolute refusal to 
 head such a political movement, as alone could meet their own wishes, had 
 doubtless reached Jerusalem, and this, coupled with rumours of His inno- 
 vations and independence as a religious reformer, had thoroughly alarmed 
 the authorities at Jerusalem, Discarding invective, craft, or indirect 
 approach, their deputies now came, no longer to the disciples, but to Him- 
 self, with specific complaints, which the easy access to pi'ivate life per- 
 mitted by the freedom of Eastern manners had enabled them to establish. 
 The disciples had already given offence by plucking and rubbing ears of 
 barley on the Sabbath, and thus, as it was held, reaping and threshing 
 on the sacred day; but a still graver scandal in Pharisaic eyes had been 
 detected in their sitting down to eat without ceremonially washing their 
 hands. The law of Moses required purifications in certain cases, but the 
 Rabbis had perverted the spirit of Leviticus in this, as in other things, for 
 they taught that food and drink could not be taken with a good conscience 
 when there was the possibility of ceremonial defilement. If every con- 
 ceivable precaution had not been taken, the person or the vessel used 
 might have contracted impurity, which would thus be conveyed to the 
 food, and through the food to the body, and by it to the soul. Hence it 
 had been long a custom, and latteidy a strict law, that before every meal 
 not only the hands but even the dishes, couches, and tables should be 
 scrupulously washed. 
 
 The legal washing of the hands before eating was especially sacred to 
 the Rabbinist ; not to do so was a crime as great as to eat the flesh of 
 swine. " He who neglects hand- washing," says the book Sohar, " deserves 
 to be punished here and hereafter." " He is to be destroyed out of the 
 world, for in hand-washing is contained the secret of the ten command- 
 ments." " He is guilty of death." " Three sins bring poverty after them," 
 says the Mishna, " and to slight hand-washing is one." " He who eats 
 bread without hand-washing," says Rabbi Jose, " is as if he went in to a 
 harlot." The later Schulchan Aruch enumerates twenty-six rules for this 
 rite in the morning alone. " It is better to go four miles to water than to 
 incur guilt by neglecting hand-washing," says the Talmud. " He Avho 
 does not wash his hands after eating," it is said, " is as bad as a murderer."
 
 THE TUBN 01-' TUE DAY. 479 
 
 The devil Scliibta sifcs on unwashed hands and on the bread. It Vvas a 
 special mark of the Pharisees that " they ate their daily bread with due 
 purificatLou," and to neglect doing so was to be despised as unclean. 
 
 ]labbinism vfas now in its highest glory, for the great teachers Hillcl 
 and Shammai, who had died hardly a generation befoi'c, had developed it 
 to the uttermost. They disputed so fiercely, indeed, on many trifling 
 details, that it was often said that Elias himself, when he came, would 
 hardly be able to decide between them. But they agreed respecting hand- 
 washing, so that the Talmud maintains that " any one living in the land of 
 Israel, eating his daily food in purification, speaking the Hebrew of the 
 day, and morning and evening praying duly with the phylacteries, is cer- 
 tain that he will eat bread in the kingdom of God." 
 
 It was laid down that the hands were first to be washed clean. The tips 
 of the ten fingei's were then joined and lifted up so that the water ran 
 down to the elbows, then turned down so that it might run off to the 
 ground. Fresh water was poured on them as they were lifted up, and 
 twice again as they hung down. The washing itself was to be done by 
 rubbing the fist of one hand in the hollow of the other. When the hands 
 were washed before eating they must be held upwards ; when after it, 
 downwards, but so that the water should not run beyond tlie knuckles. 
 The vessel used must be held first in the right, then in the left hand ; the 
 water was to be poured first on the right, then on the left hand, and at 
 every third time the words repeated : " Blessed art Thou who hast given 
 us the command to wash the hands." It was keenly disputed whether the 
 cup of blessing or the hand-washing should come first ; whether the towel 
 used should be laid on the table or on the couch ; and whether the table 
 was to be cleared before the final washing or after it." 
 
 This anxious trifling over the infinitely little was, however, only part of 
 a system. If a Pharisee proposed to eat common food it was enough that 
 the hands were washed by water poured on them. Before eating Terumah 
 — the holy tithes and the shew-bread — they must be dipped completely in 
 the water, and before the portions of the holy offerings could be tasted, a 
 bath must be taken. Hand-washing before prayer, or touching anything 
 in the morning, was as rigidly observed, for evil spirits might Lave defiled 
 the hands in the night. To touch the mouth, nose, ear, eyes, or the one 
 hand with the other, before the rite, was to incur the risk of disease in the 
 part touched. The occasions that demanded the observance were count- 
 less: it must be done even after cutting the nails, or killing a flea. The 
 more water used, the more piety. " He who uses abundant Avater for 
 hand-washing," says R. Cliasda, " will have abundant riches." If one had 
 not been out it Avas enough to pour water on the hands ; but one coming 
 in from without needed to plunge his hands into the water, for ho knew 
 not what imcleanness might have been near him while in the streets, and 
 this plunging could not be done except in a spot where there were not less 
 thiii sixty gallons of water. 
 
 The same scrupulous, superstitious minuteness extended to possible 
 dciilemcnts of all the household details of daily life. Dishes, hollow or 
 flat, of whatever material, knives, tables, and couches, were constantly
 
 480 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 subjected to purificatious, lest they slionld have contracted any Levitical 
 defilement by being nsed by some one nnclcan. 
 
 This ritual exaggeration Avas, apparently, a result of the jealousy 
 between the democratic Pharisees and the lordly Sadducees. The latter 
 attached supreme importance to the ceremonial sanctity of the officiating 
 priests, to exalt themselves as the clerical aristocracy. The Pharisees, to 
 humble them, laid the stress, as far as possible, on the vessels used, and 
 the exactness of the act. In keeping with their endless washings in 
 private, they demanded that all the vessels of the Temple itself should be 
 purified after each feast, lest some unclean person might have defiled them 
 — a refinement which drew down on a Pharisee, who was carrying out 
 even the golden candlestick itself to wash it after a festival, the mocking 
 gilje from a Sadducee, that he expected before long the Pharisees would 
 give the sun a washing. 
 
 The authority for this endless, mechanical religionism was the com- 
 mands or " traditions " of the Fathers, handed down from the days of the 
 Great Synagogue, but ascribed with pious exaggeration to the Almighty, 
 who, it was said, had delivered them orally to ]\toses on Mount Sinai. 
 Interpretations, expositions, and discussions of all kinds, were based, not 
 only on every separate word, or on every letter, but even on every pause 
 and breathing, to create new laws and observances, and where these were 
 not enough, oral traditions, said to have been given by God to Moses on 
 the Mount, were invented to justify new refinements. These "traditions" 
 were constantly increased, and formed a New Law, which passed from 
 mouth to mouth, and from generation to generation, till, at last, public 
 schools rose for its study and development, of which the most famous 
 were those of Hillel and Shammai, in the generation before Jesus, and 
 even, perhaps, in His early childliood. In His lifetime it was still a 
 fundamental rule that they should not be committed to writing. It was 
 left to Rabbi Judah the Holy, to commence the collection and formal en- 
 grossing of the almost countless fragments of which it consisted, and from 
 his weary labour ultimately rose the huge folios of the Talmud. 
 
 As in the case of the Brahminical theocracy of India, that of Judca 
 attached more importance to the ceremonial precepts of its schools than 
 to the sacred text on which they were based. Wherever Scripture and 
 tradition seemed opposed, the latter was treated as the higher authority. 
 Pharisaism openly proclaimed this, and set itself, as the Gospel expresses 
 it, in the chair of Moses, displacing the great lawgiver. " It is a greater 
 offence," says the Mishna, " to teach anything contrary to the voice of the 
 Eabbis, than to contradict Scripture itself. He who says, contrary to 
 Scrij)ture, 'It is not lawful to wear the Tephillin'" — the little leather 
 boxes containing texts of Scripture, bound, during prayer, on the forehead 
 and on the arm — " is not to be punished as a troubler. But he who says 
 there should l)e five divisions in the Totaphoth "^another name for the 
 Tephillin, or phylacteries— "and thus teaches differently from the Eabbis, 
 is guilty." " He who expounds the Scriptures in opposition to the tradi- 
 tion," says R. Eleazar, " has no share in the world to come." The mass of 
 Rabbinical prescriptions— not the Scripture— was regarded as the basis of
 
 THE TURN OF THE DAY. 481 
 
 religion, "for the Covenant of God was declared to have been made with 
 Isi'ael on account of the oral Law, as it is written, ' After the tenor of 
 these xvords I have made a covenant,' etc. For God knew that, in after 
 ages, Israel would be carried away among strange people, who would copy 
 oil the written Law, and, therefore, He gave them the oral Law, that His 
 will might be kept secret among themselves." Those who gave them- 
 selves to the knowledge of the traditions " saw a great light," for God 
 enlightened their eyes, and showed them how they ought to act in relation 
 to lawful and unlawful things, clean and unclean, which are not told thus 
 fully and clearly in Scriptui-e. It was, perhaps, good to give one's self to 
 the reading of the Scripture, but he who reads diligently the traditions 
 receives a reward from God, and he who gives himself to the Commen- 
 taries on these traditions has the greatest reward of all. " The Bible was 
 like water, the Traditions like wine, the Commentaries on them like spiced 
 wine." " My son," says the Talmud, " give more heed to the words of the 
 Eabbis than to the words of the Law." So exactly alike is Ultra-High- 
 churchism in every age, and in all religions ! 
 
 Jesus had no sympathy with a system which thus ignored conscience, 
 and found the essence of religion in the slavery of outAvard forms. The 
 New Kingdom was in the heart : in the loving sonship of the Father in 
 Heaven; and all outward observances had value only as expressions of 
 this tender relationship. The Pharisees had refined the Law into a micro- 
 scopic casuistry which prescribed for every isolated act, but Jesus brought 
 it into the compass of a living principle in the soul. From the outer 
 particular requirement. He passed to the spirit it was intended to express. 
 Special enactments were sulfered to fall aside, if the vital idea they 
 embodied were honoured. A lifetime was hardly enough to learn the 
 Eabbinical precejDts respecting offerings, but Jesus virtually abrogated 
 them all by the short utterance that " mercy was better than sacrifice." 
 The schools had added to the simple distinctions of the Law between clean 
 and imclean beasts, endless refinements respecting different parts of each, 
 and the necessary rites ; the simple rule of Jesus was — It is not what 
 enters the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes from the heart. The 
 Rabbis contended respecting the occasions on which vessels should be 
 purified in running rather than in drawn water, and how the purifications 
 of wooden and metal dishes were to be minutely discriminated. Jesus 
 waived aside this trifling and deadly pedantry, and told His hearers to 
 take care to be clean within, and then the outside would be clean also. 
 Eveu the Sabbath laws, with their countless enactments, were as briefly 
 condensed. " It is lawful to do good on the Sabbath day." " The Sabbath 
 was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Such teaching was new in 
 Israel. It was revolutionary in the grandest sense. 
 
 The deputation of Rabbis now sent to Capernaum were determined to 
 bring matters to a crisis. Their spies, and perhaps themselves, had care- 
 fully gathered evidence whether Jesus and His disciples observed the 
 traditions, and carried them out with the minuteness of a recognised re- 
 ligious duty; whether He and they dipped their hands duly before eating; 
 whether they held them up or down in doing so ; whether they wetted 
 
 II
 
 482 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 them to the elbows or to tlie knuckles, or wetted uuly tlic tinger-tips, as 
 tlic school of Shammai prescribed for certain cases ; and they had found, 
 to their horror, that neither He nor His disciples washed their hands thus 
 ceremonially at all. The next Passover would show how formally they 
 had laid their information against Him, before the Sanhedrim, with its 
 leaders, the high priest Caiaphas and the powerful Hannas, for such 
 independence and audacity. 
 
 Meanwhile, their demand for an explanation gave Jesus the desired 
 opportunity to break, finally, w4th their whole party. A casuistry worthy 
 of Suarez or Escobar, had sapped the fundamental principles of morality, 
 in the name of religion. With a keen eye to the interests of their caste, 
 the Rabbis had trifled with the subject of oaths and vows in such a way 
 that the treasury of the Temple was not only sacred from all pul^lic appeals, 
 but was continually enriched by money which ought, rightfully, to have 
 gone to the support of families and relations, and even of aged or poor 
 parents. The utterance of the ATord "Corban"— "I have vowed it to 
 sacred uses " — sequestrated anything, absolutely and irreversibly, to the 
 Temple. It might be spoken under the influence of death-bed terroi', or 
 in the weakness of superstitious fear, but if once uttered, the Church 
 threw round the money or property thus secured, the impassable barrier 
 of her ghostly claims. 
 
 To honour one's parents was one of the " Ten Words " of Sinai, and no 
 duty was held more sacred by a Jew unperverted by Rabbinical sophistry. 
 It was not forgotten that it was the one commandment to which a promise 
 of reward was attached. "A child is bound to maintain his parents when 
 old and helpless," says one passage in the Talmud, " even if he have to 
 beg to do so." But this, unfortunately, was not the uniform teaching of 
 Christ's day. If one Rabbi had put filial duty before the right to vow for 
 one's own advantage, others had taught that it was a duty to honour God 
 before honouring human relationships — a smooth phrase for legalising 
 gifts to the Church at the expense even of father and mother. The 
 hierarchical party ignored all interests but their own, and subordinated 
 natural duty to their own enrichment. Pharisaism, in its moral decay, 
 had come to be a spiritual death, corrupting the springs of national life. 
 A few years later, in the time of the great famine of the year a.d. 4-5, 
 under Claudius, the theocratic party cared for themselves so heartlessly, 
 that while the people were perishing of hunger by hundreds, no remission 
 of Temple dues was permitted, aiid the Passover alone saw forty-one 
 Attic bushels of wheat presented at the altar, to be presently removed 
 for the use of the priests, though the issarion — a measui-e of three and a 
 half pints — sold for four drachmas, a sum equal to about twenty-six 
 shillings at the present value of money. Josephus, indeed, boasts that 
 no priest ate a crumb of the grain thus relentlessly hoarded ; but when 
 even a high priest was known as " the disciple of gluttons," rioting in 
 great feasts on the sacrifices and wine of the altar, the mass of his order 
 would not be fastidious about the wheat and the bread. 
 
 Representatives of this smooth hypocrisy had now gathered round 
 Jesus, and proceeded to inquire into His alleged unlawful acts. " How
 
 THE TURN OF THE DAY. 483 
 
 comes it," asked they, " that a teacher who claims a higher sanctity than 
 others, can quietly permit His disciples to neglect a custom imposed by 
 our wise forefathers, and so carefully observed by every pious Israelite ? 
 How is it that they do not wash their hands before eating? " 
 
 " They neglect only a ceremony introduced by men," retorted Jesus ; 
 " but how comes it that you, v/ho know the Law, transgress commands 
 which are not of man, but from God Himself? How comes it that, for 
 the sake of traditions invented by the Eabbis, you set aside the most 
 explicit commands of God? He has, for example, said that we must 
 honour our father and mother, and support and care for them in old age. 
 He has declared it worthy of death for any one to deny his parents due 
 reverence, or to treat them harshly or with neglect. But you have 
 invented a doctrine which absolves children, in many cases, from this 
 commandment. ' If any one,' says your ' tradition,' ' is asked by his 
 parents for a gift or help, for their benefit, he has only to say that he has 
 vowed that very part of his means to the Temple, and they cannot press 
 him fm-ther to contribute to their support.' How cunningly have you 
 thus circumvented God's law ! How easy is it for any one to break it, 
 and affect a zeal for religion in doing so ! 
 
 " Ye hypocrites ! acting religion " — now for the first time thus denounc- 
 ing them and their party — " well has Isaiah painted you when he introduces 
 God as saying, ' This nation has its worship in words, and its religion is 
 of the lips, while its heart is far from Me. Their service of Me is worth- 
 less, for it is not My Law, but only human invention.' These words 
 describe you to the letter. You put aside what God has commanded, and 
 has enforced by promises and threats, and yet keep superstitiously, ' tradi- 
 tions ' which only custom, and homage to human teachers, have intro- 
 duced. Of this kind are your hand-washings, and many similar usages." 
 
 Such a defence was an open declaration of war against Pharisaism, and 
 the hierarchy closely identified with it. His words struck at the insin- 
 cerity and false-heartedness of the party as a whole, at its fundamental \ 
 principles, its practice, its modes of thought, its whole ideas- and aims. 
 They are pious, very pious. He tells them, in outward seeming. They 
 keep the traditions fastidiously, but their piety is from the lips, not the 
 heart ; obedience to the Rabbis, not God. They wash pots and cups, and 
 care for gifts, as their religion, and ignore the commands of Jehovah. No 
 irony could be more keen or annihilating. What flames of rage must it 
 have kindled iii the hearts of the great party so mortally assailed ? They 
 could not challenge His loyalty to the higher law, for He spoke as its 
 Champion against their human additions and perversions. They could 
 not but feel that, far from destroying either the Law or the Prophets, He 
 was ennobling and exalting them. But the very light He poured on the 
 oracles of God showed so much the more the worthlessness of their 
 cherished system, and their misconception of their office as the teachers 
 of the people. He had virtually condemned not only their putting wash- 
 ings above duty to parents; He had denounced them for laying more 
 stress on the Temple worship and ritual than on such filial piety. Hence 
 washings, sacrifices, alms, and fasts ; all the boastful, pretentious worship
 
 484 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 and outward practice on wliicli tlicy rested, were of no value compared 
 with the great eternal commands of God, and were even crimes and impiety, 
 when they proudly set themselves in their room. He arraigned Phari- 
 saism, the dominant orthodoxy, as a whole. The system, so famous, so 
 arrogant, so intensely Jewish, was only an invention of man ; a subversion 
 of the Law it claimed to represent, an antagonism to the Prophets as well 
 as to Moses, the spiritual ruin of the nation ! 
 
 The die was finally cast. All that it involved had been long weighed, 
 but He who had come into the world to witness to the Truth, could let no 
 prudent regard for self restrain His testimony. It was vital that the 
 people who followed the Rabbis and priests should know what the religion 
 and morals thus taught by them were worth. The truth could not find 
 open ears while men's hearts were misled and prejudiced by such in- 
 structors, No one would seek inward renewal who had been taught to 
 care only for externals, and to ignore the sin and corruption within. 
 Pharisaism was a creed of inoral cosmetics and religious masks, as all 
 ritual systems mnst ever be. With Jesus, the only true religion was 
 purity of heart and absolute sincerity to truth. Leaving the Eabbis, 
 therefore, and calling round Him the crowd Avhich was lingering near, He 
 proclaimed aloud the great principle He had laid down — " Hear me, all 
 of you," cried He, " and understand. There is nothing from without the 
 man that, entering into him, can defile him; but the things which come 
 out of the man are those that defile him." Words clear enough to us, 
 perhajis, but grand beyond thought when uttered, for they were the knell 
 of caste — heard now, for the first time, in the history of the world;— the 
 knell of national divisions and hatreds, and of the religious worth of 
 external observances, as such, and the inauguration of a universal religion 
 of spirit and truth ! They proclaimed that nothing external, made clean 
 or unclean, holy or unholy. Purity and impurity were words applicable 
 only to the soul and its utterances and acts. The charter of spiritual 
 religion, the abrogation of the supremacy of forms and formula for ever, 
 was at last announced; the leaven of religious freedom cast into the life 
 of humanity, to leaven it throughout in the end ! 
 
 Even the disciples were alarmed at an attitude so revolutionary. In com- 
 mon with the nation at large, they looked on the Rabbis with a supersti- 
 tious reverence, and now hastened to tell Jesus how deeply the whole class 
 was offended by His words. It was hard for simple Galitean peasants to 
 break away from hereditary habits of thought. But Christ's answer was 
 ready. " Every plant which my Heavenly Father has not planted, shall 
 be rooted out. Leave them : they are blind leaders of the blind, and, as 
 such, both they and their followers must stumble on to destruction ! " 
 The plants of human, not Divine planting, were the " traditions " and 
 "commandments of men"— the "hedge of the Law," in which the Rabbis 
 gloried. Henceforth, there was a breach for ever between the men of the 
 schools and the New King-dom. 
 
 But the mind is slow to realize great spiritual truths. To the disciples, 
 their Master's words were dark and strange, demanding explanation. 
 "Nor was it possible, either then, or even to the very last, to familiarize
 
 THE COASTS OF THE HEATHEN. 485 
 
 them with the new ideas they involved, or free them from the influence of 
 past modes of thought. The tendency to regard tlie external and formal 
 as a vital and leading characteristic of religion, was well-nigh unconquer- 
 able in minds habituated to Jewish conceptions. An earnest request of 
 Peter for further explanation, only drew forth an amplification of what 
 had been already said. The evil in man was traced directly to the 
 thoughts ; but to eat with unwashed hands, it was rejDeated, made a man 
 in no way " common " or polluted, as alleged by the Pharisees. Yet the 
 truth had to lie long in the breasts of the Twelve before it wrought their 
 spiritual emancipation from the slavery of the past. The natural and 
 eternal distinction of good and evil was proclaimed, after having been 
 obscured for ages by an artificial morality ; but fully to unlearn inveter- 
 ate prejudice would require the lapse of generations. 
 
 CHAPTER XLV. 
 
 THE COASTS OF THE HEATHEN. 
 
 JESUS had now, apparently, been two years before the world as a reli- 
 gious teacher, and had shared the usual lot of those who seek to reform 
 entrenched and prosperous abuses. His brief and dazzling popularity 
 had roused the bitter hostility of threatened interests, and they were at 
 last banded together for His. destruction. For months past He had seen 
 the death-clouds gathering ever more threateningly over Him, and devoted 
 Himself, with calm anticipation of the end, to the task of training the 
 Twelve to continue His work when He had perished. He had taken the 
 utmost care to avoid open collision Avith His enemies, and to confine Him- 
 self to the instruction of the little circle round Him ; but the priests and 
 Eabbis had been quick to see in this very quiet and retirement their 
 greatest danger, for open conflict might destroy what peaceful seclusion 
 would give opportunity to take root. " The world," as He Himself ex- 
 pressed it, " hated Him, because He witnessed of it that its works were 
 evil." Not only His formal accusations a:id the spirit of His teaching, 
 but His whole life and actions, and even His gentlest words, arraigned 
 things as they were. 
 
 Rumours of possible action against Him by Antipas increased the diSi- 
 culty of the situation. Every one knew that He and many of His followers 
 had come from the school of the Baptist, whom Antii)as had just mui'dered, 
 and it was evident that His aim was more or less similar to that of John, 
 though His acts were more wonderful. Hence sjaeculation was rife re- 
 specting Him. Was He the promised Elias ? or, at least, Jeremiah, risen 
 from the dead ? or was He some special prophet sent from God ? Many, 
 indeed, were questioning if He might not even be the Messiah, and were 
 willing to accept Him as- such, if He would only head a national revolt, in 
 alliance with the Rabbis and priests, against the Romans. To Antipas 
 His appearance Avas doubly alarming, for it seemed as if the fancied revo- 
 lutionary movement of John had broken out afresh, more fiercely than ever,
 
 486 THE LIFE OP CHEIST. 
 
 and superstition, working in an uneasy conscience, easily saw in Him a 
 resurrection of tlie murdered BajDtist, endowed, now, with the awful power 
 of the eternal world from which he had returned. A second murder 
 seemed needed to make the first effective, and to avoid this additional 
 danger Jesus for a time sought concealment. 
 
 But the craft and violence of the half -heathen Antipas was a slight evil 
 compared with the hatred which glowed ever more intensely in the breasts 
 of the Eabbis and priests of Jerusalem, and in those of the Pharisees and 
 other disciples of the schools, scattered over the country. The demands 
 of Jesus went far beyond the mere summons of the Baptist, to prepare for 
 a new and better time. He required immediate submission to a new 
 Theocracy. He excited the fury of the dominant party, not like the Bap- 
 tist, hj isolated bursts of denunciation, but by working quietlj^, as a King 
 in His own kingdom, which, though in the world, was yet something far 
 higher. Hence, the feeling against Him was very different from the 
 partial, cautious, and intermittent hatred to the Baptist. The hierarchy 
 and the Rabbis, as the centre of that which, with all its corruptions, was, 
 as yet, the only true religion on earth, felt themselves compromised 
 directly and fatally by Him, and could not maintain themselves as they 
 were, if He were tolerated. The whole spiritual power of Israel was thus 
 arrayed against Him; a force slowly created by the possession, for ages, 
 of the grandest religious truths known to the ancient world, and by the 
 pride of a long and incomparably sublime national history. In the past, 
 it had been assailed from without, at long intervals, but in recent years it 
 had been, for the first time, attacked from within by the Baptist, and now 
 felt itself still more dangerously assaulted by this Galilcean. To crush 
 such an apparently insignificant opponent — a peasant of N'azareth, rising, 
 singly and unsupported, against a power so colossal — seemed easy ; nor 
 could it be fancied more difficult to scatter and destroy His small band of 
 followers, as yet, mostly, despised peasants. 
 
 The fii'st official step towards the repression of the new movement had, 
 apparently, been already taken, on the occasion of the last visit of Jesus to 
 Jerusalem. His cure of the blind man on the Sabbath, had then brought 
 down on Him the warning punishment of the lesser excommunication, 
 which entailed formal exclusion from the synagogues of Judea, and was 
 all they dared as yet inflict. In consequence of it, He had never returned 
 to the south, but confined Himself to the north, where the synagogues 
 were still open to Him. The same sentence seems now to have been 
 gradually extended to the synagogues of Galilee, for we cease to read of 
 His entering them or teaching in them. But as this measure evidently 
 failed, spies were let loose on Him, to dog His steps constantly, and find 
 ground for fresh charges, even by invading the privacy of His home life. 
 
 This deadly hatred, with all that it involved in the future, had been 
 foreseen from the first, and His utmost care, His seclusion, and His 
 innocence, had only delayed the crisis that had now come. The founda- 
 tion of His New Kingdom on a firm basis, by the choice and preparation 
 of the Twelve, had, however, lightened the thought of it, and neutralized 
 its worse consequences. Yet it was still necessary to ward off the cata-
 
 THE COASTS OF THE HEATHEN. 487 
 
 stroplie as long as possible, in onder to advance the great -work of Ijuilding 
 up and consolidating the infant society He had established; foi- it was 
 slow work to ripen vigorous faith and adequate spirituality, even in those 
 under His personal influence. But the growing hatred and ill-will of His 
 enemies made lengthened residence in any one place henceforth undesir- 
 able, and He had from this time to take more frequent, as well as wider 
 circuits, to escape them. Yet there were compensating benefits, even in 
 this wandering life, for it made it easier, amidst the many unforeseen inci- 
 dents of each day, to raise the Twelve to that higher faith and greater 
 steadfastness which yet failed them, and it enabled Him to help many in 
 outlying parts, who were fitted to receive good at His hands. The gracious 
 purpose of God was thus leading Him to visit, in peace, all the chief 
 places of the land, which it was His great mission to summon to enter His 
 kingdom. 
 
 One inevitable result was, that the nearer the end came, the more neces- 
 sary was it to make clear to the Twelve the causes of this hatred shown 
 towards Him, and the Divine necessity of His approaching death. Hence, 
 He took every opportunity from this time to impress both thoughts more 
 and more clearly on His followers. His warnings against the corruptions 
 of the hierarchical party became more frequent, and constantly keener, 
 until, at last, the Twelve understood, in some measure, the whole situation. 
 
 Forsaking the shores of the Sea of Galilee, He now turned to the far 
 north, with the Twelve as companions of His flight. His way led Him 
 over the rough uplands towards Safed, with its near view of the snowy 
 summits of Lebanon. Then, leaving Gischala on the right, the road 
 passed through one of the many woody valleys of these highland regions, 
 till, at the distance of two days' journey from the lake, it reached the slope 
 at the foot of which lay the plains of Tyre. A yellow strip of beach and 
 sand divides the hills from the sea, into which stretched the insular tongue 
 of land on which Tyre was built. He looked doAvn, perhaps for the first 
 time so closely, on the smoking chimneys of the glass works of Sidon 
 and of the dye works at Tyre ; on the long rows of warehouses filled with 
 the merchandise of the world ; on the mansions, monuments, public build- 
 ings, palaces and temples of the two cities, and their harbours and moles 
 ci'owded with shipping. The busy scene before Him was the land of the 
 accursed Canaanite ; the seat of the worship of Baal and Ashtaroth, which 
 had of old so often corrupted Israel ; a region, with all its wealth and 
 splendour, and surpassing beauty of palm groves and gardens and em- 
 bowering green, so depraved and polluted, that the Hebrew had adopted 
 the name of Beelzebub — one of its chief idols — as that of the Prince of 
 Devils. Yet, even here, Jesus felt a pity and charity unknown to His 
 nation, and the great sea beyond, whitened with wing-like sails, awoke 
 a fair dream of the future, when distant lands, washed by the waves 
 over which these vessels sped, would gladly receive the message He came 
 to deliver. 
 
 Whether He passed into heathen territory is a question. He may only 
 have gone as far as the border of the alien district. The whole region 
 was more or less thickly settled by Jews, drawn by commerce, or through
 
 488 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 long historic association witli the district, which had been assigned to 
 Asshur, though never won by that tribe. As long ago as the days of the 
 Judges, the population had been half heathen, half Jewish. Kept back, 
 through all their history, from the sea-coast, Israel had come to hate the 
 life of a sailor from which they were thus debarred, and hence were con- 
 tented to settle amidst the busy traders of Phenicia, without attempting, 
 after the first failure, to dispossess them. No retreat could have promised 
 more safe retirement, but Jesus was now too universally known to remain 
 anywhere undiscovered, for numbers had come to Galilee, even from these 
 very districts, to see and hear Him. 
 
 His mission, during His life, had been repeatedly defined b}^ Himself, as 
 only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. That He felt no narrow 
 exclusiveness had been already shown by the incidents of His journey 
 through Samai'ia, and by the prophetic joy with which He had predicted 
 the entrance of many from the heathen world into His New Society. Even 
 His sympathy with loublicans and sinners, and with the outcast sunken 
 multitude, whose ignorance of Rabbinical precepts was held to mark them 
 as accursed of God, had, in fact, been as distinct protests against Pharisaic 
 bigotry as He could have made even by the formal recognition of heathen 
 as citizens of His New Kingdom. And had He not proclaimed the 
 supreme truth that God was the great Father of all mankind, and that the 
 human race, round the world, were brethren in His great household ? But 
 pity for His own nation — the Israel of the Old Covenant — for the time 
 forbade His going forth to all races, with the open invitation to join the 
 new Theocracy. It would at once have sealed the fate of His people ; 
 for what was offered to the heathen would, from that very fact, have been 
 instantly rejected by the fanatical Jew. 
 
 It was vain for Him to seek rest. A woman of the country, by lan- 
 guage a Greek, by nationality a Canaanite, and by residence a Syro-Pheni- 
 eian — for Phenicia was attached to the Roman province of Syria — perhaps 
 a heathen, but, in any case, of a humble religious heart, heard that He was 
 in the neighbourhood. His fame had long before spread so widely, that 
 the wondrous cures He had performed were everywhere known. Among 
 others, this woman had heard of them, and maternal love was quick to 
 turn them to its own unselfish account. She had a daughter " grievously 
 vexed with a devil," and at once came over the border to implore Jesus to 
 have mercy on her child. The half belief that He was the Messiah had 
 spread even to Tyre, and was accepted, in her poor unenlightened way, by 
 the supplicant. He was abroad with the Twelve when she found Him, 
 and forthwith entreated Him — " Lord, son of David, have mercy on me." 
 She had made her child's trouble her own. Such an incident, at a time 
 when He sought to remain unknown, must have been very disturbino-, for 
 it might put His enemies on His track. From whatever cause. He took 
 no notice of her prayers. But she would not be denied, and persistently 
 followed Him Avith her wailing petitions, as He went along, till the 
 Twelve, filled with harsh Jewish prejudice, and mistaking the reason of 
 their Master's silence, grew indignant at her pertinacity, and begged Him 
 to send her away and stop her crying after them. That a foreigner, and,
 
 THE COASTS OF THE HEATHEN. 489 
 
 above all, a Caiiaanito, accursed of God, should share His mercies, -was, 
 as yet, far too liberal a conception for them. Did not the Eabbis teach 
 that the race built their houses in the name of their idols, so that evil 
 spirits came and dwelt in them ? and was not Beelzebub, the Prince of the 
 Devils, their chief god ? The answer of Jesus seemed to favour this bitter 
 exclusiveness — " He was not sent except to the lost sheep of the House 
 of Israel ! " They little knew that His help was kept back only in pity 
 for His own nation, whom mercy to abhorred unclean Canaanites would 
 embitter against Him to their own destruction. It was vain, however, to 
 try to weary out a mother's love. Following Him into the house, though 
 He would fain have remained unknown, she cast herself at His feet and 
 renewed her prayer. To the Twelve she was only a " dog," as the Jews 
 regarded all heathen. Veiling the tenderness of His heart in affected 
 roughness of speech, softened, doubtless, by the trembling sympathy of 
 His voice and His gentle looks. He told her that the children — Israel, the 
 sons of God — must first be fed before others could be noticed. " It is not 
 right," said He, " to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs." 
 Then, as now, the traveller, entering or leaving a town or village, had only 
 too much reason to notice the troops of lean, sharp-nosed, masterless dogs, 
 which filled the air with their cries as he passed, and no one could sit at a 
 meal without the chance of some of them coming in at the ever-open door 
 to pick up the fragments, always to be found where only the fingers were 
 used at table. 
 
 With a woman's quickness, and a mother's invincible love, deepened by 
 irrepressible trust in Him whose face and tones so contradicted His words, 
 even this seeming harshness was turned to a resistless appeal. "Tes, 
 Lord," said she, " it is true : still the dogs are allowed to eat the fragments 
 that fall from the children's table." She had conquered. " woman," 
 said Jesus, " great is thy faith ; be it unto thee as thou wilt." His word 
 was enough, and going her way she found, on reaching her house, that 
 her daughter, no longer raving, was perfectly cured, and lay calmly in bed, 
 once more herself. The Twelve had learned, at last, that even heathen 
 " dogs " were not to be sent away unheard. 
 
 How long Jesus stayed in these parts is- unknown. It would seem as if 
 this incident had forced Him to leave sooner than He had proposed. He 
 did not, however, return at once to Capernaum, but set out north-east- 
 wards, through the territory of Sidon, to the country east of Jordan. The 
 Koman road, which ran over the richly wooded hills, almost straight east- 
 wards, from Tyre to Cajsarea Philippi, was too far to the south. He must 
 have taken the caravan road, which still runs from Sidon on the south 
 side of the mountain stream Bostrenus, climbing the spurs of Lebanon, 
 with their woods and noble mountain scenery, till it crosses the range, 
 amidst peaks six thousand feet high, at the natural rock-bi'idge over the 
 deep, rushing Leontes. Turning, now, down the valley of the Upper Jordan, 
 under the shadow of the Hermon Eange, rising 9,500 feet high in their 
 highest peak, Ho, erelong, at Cassarea Philippi, reached the open country, 
 Avith a wide view of the broad reedy marshes of Ulatha and Mcrom, the 
 hills of Galilee, and the wide uplands of Gaulonitis. How long He spent
 
 490 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 on the journey is not told. Perhaps He stopped by the way, for Lebanon 
 was full then, as now, of villages ; perhaps He only passed through them 
 on His journey. His final purpose by this wide circuit, was to reach His 
 old haunts without going through Galilee, and this brought Him, appar- 
 ently for the first time, to the wide territory of the ten allied free cities — 
 the DecaiDolis. 
 
 These cities were simply places which the Jews had not succeeded in 
 re-conquering, after their return from Babylon. Tliey had thus remained 
 in the hands of the heathen, though in Palestine ; had preserved distinct 
 municipal government, and had joined in a political alliance, offensive and 
 defensive. To the Jews they were a continual offence, and they were the 
 first to suffer from the frenzied fanaticism of the nation when it rose in its 
 last great revolt. Most of them, full of l^usy life, and adorned with splendid 
 temples, baths, theatres, and public buildings, when Jesus passed through 
 them, were destined, before another generation, to perish by fire and sword. 
 
 Even here the fame of the great Teacher attracted multitudes of Jews 
 settled all over the half-foreign district, especially in its towns and cities, 
 and revived for a time the cheering scenes of the past. The cripple, the 
 blind, the dumlj, the deformed, and many others, variously afflicted, were 
 either brought to Him, or came ; till He was once more forced, as of old, to 
 retreat to the hills, in the vain effort to secure quiet. The popular excite- 
 ment, however, made rest impossible. They sought and found Him wher- 
 ever He might be, and enjoyed not only the benefits of His supernatural 
 power, but the richer blessings of His teaching. Only one incident is given 
 in detail. A man had been brought to Him who was deaf, and could only 
 stammer inarticulately ; and He was besought to heal him. From some 
 motive not stated. He varied from His usual course. Taking him aside 
 from the multitude, pei'haps to have more freedom, perhaps to avoid their 
 too great excitement and its possibly hurtful political consequences, Ho 
 put His fingers into the man's ears and touched his tongue with a finger 
 moistened on His own lips. It may bo that these simple forms were in- 
 tended to waken faith in one who could hear no words, for without the 
 fitting spirit, the miracle would not have been wrought. Looking up to 
 heaven, as if to lift the thoughts of the unfortunate man to the Eternal 
 Father, whose power alone could heal him, Jesus then, at last, uttered the 
 single word of the popular dialect — " Ephphatha," " Be opened " — and he 
 was perfectly cured. An injunction to keep the miracle j)rivate was of no 
 avail ; the whole country was presently filled with reports of it, and of 
 other similar wonders. 
 
 The vast concourse attracted by such scenes may be imagined ; for in 
 the East especially, it is easy for the population, with their simple wants, 
 and the mildness of the sky, which in the warm months invites sleeping in 
 the open air by night, to camp out as they think fit. But, as often hap- 
 pens, even in our own day, with the Easter pilgrims at Jerusalem, many 
 found their provisions run short, and as in these strange and motley crowds 
 numbers often die of want, not a few of those following Jesus mis;ht have 
 sunk by the way before they reached home, but for His thoughtful care. 
 Once more the crowds were caused to sit on the grass, and were fed from
 
 THE COASTS OF THE HEATHEN. 491 
 
 tlie scanty provision found on tlie sjiot, wliicli was only seven of the thin 
 round loaves of the country, and a few small dried fish from the Lake of 
 Galilee. Four thousand men, besides women 'and children, were supplied 
 from this scanty store, and seven baskets of fragments, afterwards gathered, 
 attested that they had suffered no stint. 
 
 Leaving the eastern side of the lake, to which His wanderings had led 
 Him, Jesus now, once more, crossed to the neighbourhood of Magdala, at 
 the lower end of the plain of Gennesarcth, and close to Capernaum. He 
 had scarcely reappeared before His enemies were once more in motion. 
 The Pharisees had already stifled their dislike of the Herodians, and had 
 formed an alliance with them, that they might the more easily crush Him. 
 It marked the growing malignity of feeling, that a class fanatically proud 
 of their ceremonial and moral purity — a class from whose midst had 
 sprung the Zealots for the Law, who abhorred all rule except that of a 
 restored Theocracy — should have banded themselves with a party of moral 
 indifferentists, partial to monarchy, and guilty of flattering even the hated 
 family of Herod. But a still more ominous sign of increasing danger 
 showed itself in even Sadducees joining the Pharisees to make new at- 
 tempts to compromise Jesus with the authorities. 
 
 The Sadducees, few, but haughty and j^owerful, enjoyed the higlicst 
 posts ill the Jewish state, and represented the Law. Tliey were of the 
 priestly caste, and held the chief offices in the hiei'ai'chy. Their name was 
 perhaps derived from the famous ancient family of Zadok, of Avhom Ezekiel 
 speaks as having the charge of the altar, and as, alone of the sons of Levi, 
 appointed to come before the Eternal, to serve Him. Joshua, the son of 
 Jozedek, the comrade of Zerubbabel, was of this House, so that, both 
 before and after the Return, it seems to have been the foremost among 
 the priestly families. In any case, the Sadducees of the times of Joseph us 
 and the Apostles not only held the highest Temjple offices, but represented 
 the purest Jewish blood. 
 
 But this priestly aristocracy were by no means the most zealous for the 
 sanctuary from which they drew their honours and wealth. They counted 
 in their ancestry not only high priests like Joshua and Simon the Just, 
 but traitors to their country like Manasseh, Menelaus, and the younger 
 Onias. Already, in the time of Ezra and Nohemiah, they had given occa- 
 sion for the charge that the highest officials had been foremost in breaking 
 the Theocratic laws, and had even sought to turn parts of the Temple into 
 a splendid family mansion. They had coquetted and debased their offices 
 to win favour with the Ptolemies and the Syrian kings ; they had held 
 back, in cold, selfish worldliness, from taking a vigorous part in the 
 glorious Maccabfean struggle, and now truckled to heathen procurators, or 
 a half heathen king, to preserve their honours and vested interests. To 
 please Herod, they had admitted Simon Bocthus, the Alexandrian, the 
 father of the king's young wife, to the high priesthood, from which a strict 
 Jew, Jesus the son of Phabi, had been expelled, to make room for him. 
 They had even shown frank and hearty submission and loyalty to Rome. 
 
 The nation, with its chosen religious leaders, the Pharisees — the ropre- 
 sentatives of the " Saints " who had conquered in the great war of reli-
 
 492 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 gious independence — never forgot the faint-heartedness and treachery of 
 the priestly nobles in that magnificent struggle. Their descent might 
 secure them hereditary possession of the dignified offices of the Church, 
 and there might still be a charm in their historical names ; but they were 
 regarded with open distrust and aversion by the nation and the Pharisees 
 alike, and had to make many concessions to Pharisaic rules to protect 
 themselves from actual violence. 
 
 The strict fanatical heads of the synagogue — the leaders of the people— 
 and the cold and polished Temple aristocracy, were thus bitterly opposed, 
 and it added to the keenness of the dislike that the dreams by the Eab- 
 binical, or Pharrsaic party, of a restored Theocracy, could only be realized 
 through the existing organization of the priesthood, of v/hich the indif- 
 ferent Sadducees had the control. 
 
 Theological hatred, the bitterest of all passions, added additional in- 
 tensity to this political opposition. The Sadducees had no inclination to 
 be taught their duty l)y the Eabbis of village synagogues, and rejected 
 the whole body of Pharisaic tradition and jurisprudence, taking for their 
 only authority the written Law of Moses, though to this were generally 
 added some traditions of their own. As the highest dignitaries of the 
 Theocracy, and members of families which had officiated in the Temple of 
 Solomon itself, they disdained to be taught what was lawful in Israel, or 
 to accept the hair-splitting refinements of the democratic and puritan 
 Pharisees. To the constantly increasing decisions and requirements of 
 the Rabbis, they stolidly opi)osed the venerable letter of the ancient Law. 
 That their creed was cold and rationalistic, compared to that of the Rabbis, 
 was, perhaps, the result of this attitude, but was not its cause. The in- 
 stinctive conservatism of " the first in rank," inevitably took its stand on 
 the original documents of the Law in opposition to the heated exaggerations 
 of the plebeian schoolmen. Both sides vaunted their orthodoxy. The 
 Sadducees were as deeply committed to support the Theocracy as their 
 popular rivals, for it was the basis of their dignities, their wealth, and even 
 their existence. Fierce controversies, often culminating in bloodshed, 
 marked the equal devotion of both to their respective opinions, and these 
 opinions themselves illustrated the position of the two parties. The 
 Sadducees uniformly fell back on the letter of the Law, the prescrij^tive 
 rights of the Temple, and the glory of the priesthood ; the Pharisees, on 
 the other hand, not only maintained the authority of the Rabbinical tradi- 
 tions, the value of sacred acts apart from the interposition of the jariest, 
 but advocated jiopular interests generally. 
 
 The contrast between the spirit of the two parties showed itself pro- 
 minently in the harsh tenacity with which the Temple aristocracy held to 
 the letter of the Mosaic Law in its penalties, as opposed to the milder 
 spirit in which the Pliarisees interpreted them, in accordance with the 
 spirit of the times. The Pharisees, for example, exj^lained the Mosaic 
 demand— an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth — metaphorically, and 
 allowed recompense to be made in money, but their rivals insisted on exact 
 compliance. The Sadducees required that the widow should literally spit 
 in the face of the brother-in-law who refused her the Levirate marriage
 
 THE COASTS OF THE HEATHEN. 403 
 
 rights, but it was ciiougli for the Pharisees that she spat on llie ground 
 before him. The Pharisees iiermitted the carcass of a beast that had died 
 to be used for any other purpose than food, to save loss to the owner, but 
 the Sadducees denounced the penalties of unclcauness on so lax a practice. 
 They sternly required a false witness to be put to death, according to the 
 letter of the Law, even if his testimony had done the accused no injury, 
 and many did not even shrink from carrying out the reasoning of the 
 Rabl)is, that, as two witnesses were always required to condemn the ac- 
 cused, both witnesses should always be executed when any jierjury had 
 been committed in the case. 
 
 This blind insistence on the letter of laws wliich ages had made obsolete, 
 fixed on the Sadducees the name of "The Condemning Judges," and 
 Josephus testifies that they were more ruthless in their judicial decisions 
 than any other Jews. The Pharisees, on the other hand, had for their 
 axiom the saying of Joshua Ben Perachia — " Judge everything on the 
 presumption of innocence ; " or that of Hillel — " Put yourself in your 
 neighbour's place before you judge him." Hence, a prisoner congratulated 
 himself when he saw on his judges, opposite him, the broad phylactery of 
 the Pharisee, and not the white robe of the priestly Sadducee. Both our 
 Lord and St. Paul had the multitude stirred up against them by the 
 Pharisees, but they were condemned by Sadducee judges, and it was Sad- 
 ducee judges who murdered St. James. 
 
 This relentless ferocity of priestly Houses, who rested on the favour of 
 the rich and titled few, was dictated only by the class interests of the 
 Temple nobility, whose claims and privileges could not be justified except 
 by the blind maintenance of things as they were. Resolute unyielding 
 immobility was their only safety ; the least innovation seemed an omen of 
 revolution. 
 
 But there were even deeper grounds of dislike and opposition. The 
 Pliarisees, as the hereditary representatives of puritans who had delivered 
 the nation in the great struggle against Syria, looked forward with touch- 
 ing though fanatical yearning, to .the realization of the prophecies of 
 Daniel, which, as they understood them, promised that Israel, under the 
 Messiah, and with it, themselves, should be raised " to dominion, and gloiyj 
 and a kingdom ; that all ])eoples, nations, and languages should serve Him, 
 and that His kingdom should be everlasting." They believed that this 
 national triumph would be inaugurated so soon as Israel, on its part, 
 carried out to the full the requirements of the ceremonial law, as expounded 
 in their traditions. It Avas a matter of formal covenant, in which the truth 
 and righteousness — that is, the justice, of Jehovah were involved. The 
 morals they demanded might be only mechanical, and their observances a 
 mere slavery to rites and forms ; but they believed that if they fulfilled 
 their part, God must needs fulfil His, and they strove hard to make the 
 nation, like themselves, " blameless," touching this righteousness ; that 
 they might claim Divine interposition as a right. The zeal of the Pharisee 
 for the Law was, thus, a more hired service, with all the restlessnes.s, 
 exaggeration, emulation, and moral impurity, inseparable from a mer- 
 cenary spirit.
 
 494 ■ THE LIFE OE CHRIST. 
 
 To this dream of tiae future, the Sadducees opposed a stolid and con- 
 temptuous indifference. Enjoying the honours and good things of the 
 world, they had no taste for a revolution which should introduce, they 
 knew not what, in the place of a state of things with which they were 
 quite contented. Their fathers had had no such ideas, and the sons ridi- 
 culed them. They not only laughed aside the Pharisaic notion of righteous- 
 ness, as identified with a life of minute and endless observance, but fell 
 back on the Mosaic Law, and mocked at the Messianic hope from which 
 the zeal of their rivals had sprung. " The Sadducees," says Joscphus, 
 " believe that the soul dies with the body, and recognise no authority but 
 that of the LaAV. Good was to be done for its own sake, not for reward in 
 the Messianic kingdom, or at the resurrection of the dead." " The Sad- 
 ducees," says Eabbi JSTathan, " use daily, vessels of gold and silver, not for 
 pride, but because the Pharisees torment themselves in this life, though 
 they will have nothing in the next." As to the world to come, they left it 
 doubtful, maintaining, in opposition to the Pharisees, if the words in the 
 Talmud be not an interpolation, that it could not be proved from the Books 
 of Moses. They even went the length of inventing difficulties which they 
 supposed involved in the resurrection of the dead. " They believe neither 
 in the resurrection, nor in angel, nor spirit, but the Pharisees confess 
 both," says St. Luke. 
 
 To all this was added the embitterment of opposite views on the great 
 subject of human freedom and Divine foreknowledge. Like all puritans, 
 the Pharisees exalted the latter though they did not deny the former. They 
 had a profound belief in Providence, understanding by it that they them- 
 selves were the favourites of Jehovah, and could count on His taking their 
 side. " The Sadducees," says Josephus, " maintain that there is no such 
 thing as predestinatioii, and deny that human affairs are regulated by it, 
 maintaining that our destiny rests with ourselves ; that we are the cause 
 of our own good fortune, and bring evil on us by our own folly." They 
 were, in fact, mere men of the world, believing only in the present ; the 
 Pharisees were mystics, to whom the future and the supernatural were 
 all-important. 
 
 The nation zealously supported the Pharisees. The spirit of the age 
 was against the Sadducees. The multitude disliked to hear that what the 
 Maccabfeans had defended with their blood was uncanonical. They yielded 
 cheerfully to the heavy yoke of the Pharisaic Rabbis, for, the more burden- 
 some the duties required, the greater the future reward for performance. 
 The Pharisees, moreover, were part of the people, mingled habitually with 
 them as their spiritual guides, and were the examples of exact obedience 
 to their own precepts. Their Messianic dreams were of national glory, and 
 thus the crowd saw in them the representatives of their own fondest 
 aspirations. The Sadducees— isolated, haughty, harsh, and unnational — 
 were hated ; their rivals honoured and followed. The extravagances and 
 the hypocrisy of some might be ridiculed, but they were the accepted 
 popular leaders. 
 
 Indeed, apart from all other considerations, the fact that the Sadducees 
 supported zealously every government iu turn, was enough to set the
 
 THE COASTS OF THE HEATHEN. 495 
 
 people agaiiist them. Instead of this, the Pharisees shared and fostered 
 the patriotic and religious abhorrence of the Eoman supremacy, and were 
 sworn enemies of the hated Herodian family. The result was that, in the 
 words of Josephus, " the Pharisees had such an influence with the people, 
 that nothing could be done about Divine worship, prayers, or sacrifices, 
 except according to their wishes and rules, for the community believed 
 they sought only the loftiest and worthiest aims alike in word and deed. 
 The Sadducees were few in number ; and thougli they belonged to the 
 highest ranks, had so little influence, that when elected to office, they were 
 foi'ced to comply with the ritual of the Pharisees from fear of the people." 
 
 There were, doubtless, many priests who were not Sadducees — men 
 serving God humljly; devoted to their sacred duties, and living in full 
 sjanpathy of thought and life with the Pharisees. In the disputes with 
 Jesus, we may be sure that many such Pharisaic priests — the great com- 
 pany, perhaps, who, within a short time after His death, became " obedient 
 to the Faith " — took no part in the fierce malignity of their brethren. But 
 now, for the first time, the Sadducees — haughty clerical aristocrats of the 
 Temple— joined with the hated vulgar Pharisees of the synagogue to ac- 
 complish the destruction of the new Teacher. It was the most ominous 
 sign of the beginning of the cud that had yet appeared. 
 
 Eager for a fresh dispute, the strange allies, very likely fresh from 
 .Jerusalem, no sooner found that He had returned, than they sallied forth 
 to open a discussion. " You claim," said they, " to be a teacher come from 
 God, and have given many ' signs ' that you are so in the miracles you 
 have performed. But all these signs have been untrustworthy, for we 
 know that the earth and even the air is filled with demons. It is quite 
 ])ossible that the prince of the devils, to deceive men into supporting your 
 claims, may have given you power for a time over these demons, and thus 
 all that you have done may be only a dark plot to ruin us. The Egyptian 
 magicians did miracles, but our fathers refused to believe even many of 
 the wonders wrought by Moses, for they might have been achieved only 
 ])y magic and incantations. A sign from heaven, however, is different. 
 It is beyond the power of devils : ' they can neither shine like the'sun, nor 
 give light like the moon, nor give rain unto men.' Our Kabbis tell us 
 that when the King-Messias comes, and the great war between Gog and 
 Magog begins, signs from heaven will appear. "We are not to expect Him 
 till a rainbow has spanned the world and filled it with light. Give us 
 bread from heaveii, as Moses did; or signs in the sun and moon, like 
 Joshua; or call down thunder and hail, like Samuel; or fire and rain, like 
 Elijah ; or make the sun turn back, like Isaiah ; or lot us hear the Bath 
 Jvol which came to Simon the Just — that ayc may believe you." 
 
 But Jesus knew the men with whom He had to do, and would liold as 
 little communication with them as possiljle. The tempter had long before 
 urged Him to make a vain display of His supernatural jiower in support 
 of His claims ; but as it was monstrous that miracles should be thrown 
 away on the prince of dai-kness, or wrought at his will, it was no less so 
 to work them at the bidding of men filled with his spirit. The worth of 
 proof depends on the openness to conviction. He had already said that
 
 J:96 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 to cast pearls l:)efore wild swine was only to invite tliem to turn and rend 
 you. No " sign " could avail where there was no sympathy. The truth 
 He came to proclaim appealed to the heart, and must be its own evidence, 
 winning its way, by its own Divine beauty, into humble and ready breasts. 
 External proofs could only establish external facts. 
 
 With biting irony He turned on them in a few brief incisive sentences. 
 " How is it that ye, who are so skilled in the signs of the heavens, are so 
 dull to read those around you ? You watch the sky, and talk of signs in 
 it. In the evening you say, ' Fair weather, for the sky is red ; ' and in the 
 morning, ' Foul weather to-day, for the sky is red and lowering.' When 
 you see a cloud rising in the west, you say, ' There comes a shower ; ' when 
 you see a south wind blowing, you say ' There will be heat.' You pretend 
 to tell, by the way the smoke blows on the last evening of the Feast of 
 Tabernacles, what weather there will be for the year. If it turn north- 
 ward, you say there will be much rain, and the poor will rejoice ; if it turn 
 south, you say that the rich will rejoice and the poor mourn, for there will 
 be little rain ; if it turn eastward, all will rejoice ; if westward, all mourn. 
 If God have been so gracious to men as to give signs of fair weather, of 
 wind, and of rain, how much more must He have given signs of the near 
 approach of the Messiah ? You are diligent to excess in studying the sky, 
 Ijut you ask signs of my being the Messiah, as if none had been given, 
 when many unmistakable ones invite you in your own Scriptures, in the 
 events of the day, the j)reaching of John, and in my own miracles, teaching, 
 and life. An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a si en of the 
 approach of the kingdom of God, of its own choosing, while it is blind to 
 those around it, that the Messiah must come, if the nation is not to jserish. 
 I will give you no sign but that of the prophet Jonah ; for as the warning 
 of his words was the only one given to the Ninevites, my preaching will 
 be the only sign given to you. It is its own evidence. Apart from my 
 miracles, my life and the Divine and heavenly truth I preach, are sufficient 
 proof that I am sent by God. Hereafter, indeed, Jonah will become a 
 sign in another sense ; for as He was three days and three nights in the 
 whale's belly, so I, when put to death, shall be the same time in the 
 grave." 
 
 So saying, He left them. It was clearly unsafe to stay in their neigh- 
 bourhood. Henceforth He could only lead a fugitive outlawed life, and 
 with a deep sigh at the hopelessness of winning over men J^lindcd by 
 prejudice and hardened in heart, He entered the boat once more and 
 crossed the lake to the lously aiid secure eastern side. 
 
 CHAPTEE XLVI. 
 
 IN FLIGHT ONCE MOUE. 
 
 rpHE renewed attempt to involve Jesus in a damaging dispute had 
 
 failed. He had not made an ostentatious display of supernatural 
 
 power at the bidding of His enemies, but had turned sharply on them, and
 
 IN FLIGHT ONCE MORE. 497 
 
 had left them discomfited before the multitude. They had hoped to have 
 depreciated Him, as a mere unauthorized intruder into the office of Eabbi, 
 and to have had an easy triumph, but His modest, yet dignified and keen 
 retort, had put them to shame. Their bitterness against One, now hat-d 
 and feared more than evei", was so much the greater. 
 
 His departure that autumn evening might well have saddened His heart. 
 It was His final rejection on the very spot where He had laboured most, 
 and He was leaving it, to return indeed, for a passing visit, biit never to 
 appear again publicly, or to teach or work miracles. As the boat swept 
 out into the lake, and the whole scene opened before Him — the white 
 beach, the green plain, the wooded hills behind, the white houses reflected 
 in the water, and over them the stately synagogue, in which He had taught 
 so often and done such mighty acts — it was no wonder that Ho sighed 
 deeply in spirit, borne down by the thought of the darkened mind, the 
 perverted conscience, and the stony heart that had rejected the things of 
 their peace. 
 
 Sitting in the boat amidst His disciples He was still full of such 
 thoughts. They had heard His words to His enemies, but they did not 
 seem to have realized all the danger implied in the incident. Many had 
 been led away from Him by the deceitful slanders, or specious arguments 
 of the hierarchical party, and it was well that they should be put on their 
 guard. 
 
 " Take heed, beware," said He solemnly, " of the leaven of the Pharisees 
 and Sadducees, and of the party of Herod." It so hapjDcned, however, 
 that in their hurried flight, having had no time to lay in provisions, there 
 was only one loaf in the boat, and with the childishness of uneducated 
 minds, they at once fancied He referred to their having come without 
 bread. At the well of Samaria they had thought He referred to common 
 food when He spoke of the meat of the soul; they had been as dull in 
 catching the metaphor of His flesh being the bread of life, and hereafter 
 they were to think only of natural rest when He spoke of the dead Lazarus 
 as sleeping. Reflection, like continuity of thought, comes onlj' with mental 
 training. The uncultured mind, whether old or young, learns slowly. 
 They might have remembered, from the twice repeated miraculous feed- 
 ings of the multitude, that it was indifferent how little they had with them 
 when their Master Avas in their midst, but it needs a thoughtfulness 
 and depth beyond that of average fishermen and peasants, such as they 
 were, to reason and reflect. " He tells us," they whispered, " that if we 
 buy bread from a Pharisee or a Sadducee, the bread would defile us, as 
 it would if we bought it from a Samaritan." So rude was the spiritual 
 material from which Jesus had to create the founders of Christianity ! 
 
 " ye of little faith," interrupted He, " why do ye reason among your- 
 selves because ye have no loaves ? Are your hearts hardened that you 
 cannot understand ? Have you forgotten when I broke the five loaves 
 among the five thousand, and the seven among the four thousand, how 
 many baskets and wallets full of fragments ye took up ? How could you 
 think you would ever want after that, whether we had bread with us or 
 not ? Do you not see that when I spoke of leaven I was thinking not 
 
 K K
 
 498 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 of loaves but of insti'uction ? Beware of the teaching of the Pharisees, 
 Sadducees, and Herodians, about me or about religion. They would 
 gladly fill your minds with slanders and misleading fancies ; draw you 
 away from me, and corrupt your hearts by their superstition and religious 
 acting, and self-righteous pride, or by their worldliness and unbelief." 
 
 The course of the boat was directed to the head of the lake, to Bethsaida, 
 newly re-named Julias by the Tetrarch Philip, in honour of the daughter 
 of Augustus, his patron. The old name of the village had not yet, how- 
 ever, been lost. It was on the route to the district to which Jesus was 
 hurrying, and might well have detained Him as a resting place under 
 other circumstances. Lying on the green hill above the plain of Batiha — 
 the scene of the miraculous feeding— it overlooked, at a short distance, 
 the entrance of the Jordan into the lake. To the west stretched the wide 
 tract of black basalt, rough and barren, reaching from the marshes of 
 Jordan — dotted with buffaloes luxuriating in the mire — to Chorazin and 
 Capernaum. To the south rose the bare table-land on the east of the lake, 
 and the town itself, boasting the splendid tomb just built l)y Philip, for 
 his own use, was not wanting in beauty. But Jesus had no leisure to stay, 
 nor was there an inducement in any kindly bearing of the population 
 towards Him. He had often taught in their streets and synagogue, and 
 had lived in their houses, and done many mighty works before them, yet, 
 like the people of Chorazin and Capernaum, they had listened to their 
 Rabbis rather than to Him, and had refused to repent. There still, how- 
 ever, were some who had better thoughts, and these, seeing Plim enter the 
 town, hurriedly brought a blind man, that He might touch and heal him. 
 Even in a jilace that would not hear Him, His tender heart could not 
 withhold its pity. It would have attracted notice when it was most to be 
 avoided had He healed the sufferer in the public street, and, therefore, 
 taking him by the hand, He led him into the fields outside. The cure 
 might have been wrought by a word, but He chose to use the same simple 
 form as in the case of the dumb man in the Decapolis. Touching the blind 
 eyes with His moistened finger, perhaps to arrest the wandering thoughts 
 and predispose him to trust in the Healer, He asked the blind man " if he 
 saw aught ? " The supernatural power of the touch had had due effect. 
 With upturned eyes, the hitherto blind could see indistinctly. Men moved 
 before him, in undefined haze, like trees. The partial cure must have 
 strengthened his faith, and thus prepared him for perfect restoration. 
 Another touch and he could see clearly, far and near. " Go to your home," 
 said Jesus, " without returning to the town, and tell no one about it." The 
 less publicity given to His acts or words, the safer for Christ. 
 
 The retreat to which Jesus was making was the town of Cassarea Philippi. 
 It lay on the north-east of the reedy and marshy plain of El Huleh. It 
 was close to Dan, the extreme north of the bounds of ancient Israel, as 
 Beersheba was the extreme south. Almost on a line with Tyre, it was 
 thus, far out of the reach of the Eabbis and High Priests. A town, Baal- 
 Gad— named from the Canaanite god of fortune— had occupied the site 
 from immemorial antiquity; but Philip having rebuilt it splendidly, three 
 years before Christ's birth, had called it Ca^sarea, in honour of Augustus,
 
 IN FLIGHT ONCE MORE. 499 
 
 in accordance with the prevailing flattery of the Emperor. It had been 
 the pleasure of his peaceful reign to adorn it with altars, votive images, 
 and statues, and his own name had been added by the people, to distinguish 
 it from the Csesarea on the sea-coast. Nineteen years before Christ's 
 birth, Herod the Great, Philip's father, in grateful acknowledgment of 
 the gift of the districts of Paulas and Ulatha, adorned the spot with a 
 grand temple of white marble, dedicated to the Emperor, who, while still 
 alive, was thus deified by the king of the Jews. The worship of the sheji- 
 herd god Pan, to whom a cave out of which burst the waters of the Jordan, 
 was sacred, had given its second name, Pauias — now, Bauias — to the place. 
 It was one of the loveliest spots ia the Holy Land, built on a terrace of 
 rock, part of the range of Hermon, which rose behind it seven or eight 
 thousand feet. Countless streams niurmured down the slopes, amidst a 
 unique richness and variety oi flower, and shrub, and tree. The chief 
 source of the Jordan still bursts in a full silver-clear stream from a 
 bottomless depth of water, iu the old cave of Pan, at the foot of the moun- 
 tain, beneath a high perpendicular wall of rock, adorned with niches once 
 filled with marble Naiads of the stream and Satja-s of the woods, and with 
 countless votive tablets ; but now strewn round with the ruins of the 
 ancient temple of the god. Thick woods still shade the channel of the 
 young river. Oaks and olive groves alternate with pastures and fields 
 of grain, and high over all rises the old castle of Banias, perhaps the 
 "Tower of Lebanon that looketli towards Damascus," of the Song of 
 Solomon. 
 
 To this scene Jesus had now come, and might have fouiid in the beauty 
 of nature a balm for His tired and stricken heart, had He been free to 
 think of such outward charms. From the hill on which the town stood — 
 one of the lower spurs of Hermon— the view ranged over all northern 
 Palestine, from the plains of Phenicia to the hills of Samaria. In the 
 noi"th-west rose the dark gigantic mountain forms of Lebanon ; to the 
 south stretched out the rich table-land of the Hauraii. From Hermon, 
 not from Zion, or the Mount of Olives, one beholds "the good land, the 
 land of brooks, of waters, of fountains, of depths that spring out of the 
 valleys and hills ; a laud of wheat and barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and 
 pomegranates; a land of oil olive and honey." Far and near the surpass- 
 ingly fruitful landscape was watered by sparkling brooks flowing into 
 the main stream of Jordan, here only twenty steps broad. So far back as 
 the days of the Judges, the children of Dan, wandering hither from the 
 south, had found it wanting iu nothing that earth could give. Wheat 
 fields alternated with fields of barley, maize, sesame, and rice, olive 
 orchards, meadows, and flowery pastures — the delight of countless bees ; 
 and the slopes were covered with woods, vocal with the songs of birds. 
 
 But even Jesus had few thoughts, at such a time, for mere rural glories. 
 He was a fugitive and outlaw, rejected by the nation He had come to 
 redeem; safe only because He was outside the bounds of Israel, in a 
 heathen region. It was clear that His public work was virtually over, for 
 even in Galilee, where multitudes had followed Him, His popularity had 
 waned under the calumnies of the Raljbis, and His steady refusal to
 
 500 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 sanction the popular conception of the Messiah. From the moment they 
 had seen that lie sought only spiritual aims, and was not a second Judas 
 the Galilasan, they had gone back to their own teachers, who favoured the 
 national views, and instead of demanding repentance and a new life, 
 recognised their race as the favourites of Jehovah, and the predestined 
 heirs of the Messiah's Kingdom. The death of the Baptist foretold 
 Christ's own fate. The crisis of His life had come. If He had won few 
 true followers. He had securely founded the ITew Kingdom of God. It 
 might indeed, as yet, be but a seed in the great field of the world, or a 
 speck of leaven in the vast mass of humanity ; but the seed would multiply 
 itself to the ends of the earth, and the leaven would slowly but surely 
 spread, age after age, thi-ough the whole race of man. His own death 
 would now no longer be fatal to the New Society ; the germ of its fullest 
 development would survive in the bosom of the Twelve, and of the other 
 faithful souls who had received Him. 
 
 But it was necessary that the band, to whom the spread of His Kingdom 
 after His death would be entrusted, should be confirmed in their faith, and 
 enlightened by explicit disclosures of His spiritual dignity and His re- 
 lations to themselves. There was much, even in their humble and honest 
 hearts, that needed coi'rection and elevation. They were Jews, trained in 
 the theology of His enemies, and still unconsciously influenced by it to a 
 great extent. 
 
 The conceptions of Jesus respecting His kingdom were utterly different 
 from theirs, and therefore He had not, as yet, formally claimed the title of 
 Messiah, even in the circle of the Twelve, though He had never hesitated 
 to accept Messianic homage when it was offered. Once, to the Samaritan 
 woman, and once, by silent assent, to the Twelve, He had assumed the 
 awful dignity, and the whole spirit of His teaching and life implied His 
 claim to it. But, even to the Apostles, there had been a reticence and 
 caution, that He might not anticipate the development of their religious 
 nature, and disclose a mystery they were, as yet, unable to receive. Before 
 the people at large He had never assumed the Messiahship, for, with their 
 gross political ideas, to have done so would have been to bring Himself 
 into collision with the State at once. He had even, as far as possible, kept 
 His supernatural work in the background, shunning publicity as a worker 
 of miracles, and leaving the progress of His Kingdom rather to the Divine 
 beauty of His teaching and life. To have put Himself forward, from the 
 first, as the Messiah, would have closed at once all avenues of influence ; 
 for He was in every way the very opposite of the national ideal. They ex- 
 pected their race to be exalted to supreme honour and power ; He sought 
 to humble them to the lowliest contrition. They expected that, under the 
 Messiah, the heathen Avould bow before Israel ; He proclaimed that the 
 heathen were to have equal rank and rights with " the people of God." 
 They expected that the traditions of the Eabbis, with their infinite obser- 
 vances, were to be made the law for all countries and ages ; He announced 
 their utter abrogation, and the establishment, with men at large, of a new 
 covenant of filial liberty, in place of the old covenant with a single people. 
 They expected a sudden and violent political convulsion, heralded by a dis.
 
 IN FLIGHT ONCE MOEE. 501 
 
 tm-bance of the order of nature by unprecedented signs and wonders in 
 the heavens and on earth, and of the liistory of nations ; He taught that 
 the Messianic Kingdom would be brought about only by the silent might 
 of words, and of the Spirit of God, renewing all natural and moral re- 
 lations of men, but only by a slow and well-nigh imperceptible advance. 
 Not only the nation, but even the Twelve, had utterly to unlearn the fixed 
 ideas of the past, before a spiritual IMessiahship could be welcome to them. 
 How difficult that was, is shown by the request of Salome, the mother of 
 James and John, after the disciples had openly acknowledged their Leader 
 as the Messiah, that her two sons should sit in the high places of honour, 
 on the right and left of the Messianic throne. 
 
 In the conscious Divinity of His nature, Jesus had never yet asked the 
 Twelve any question respecting Himself, but it was necessary, now that 
 the end was approaching, that they should know Him in His true dignity. 
 He must reveal Himself definitely as the Messiah, and be formally accepted 
 as such. To have confined Himself, like John, to the announcement of the 
 kingdom of God as at hand, would have left that kingdom incomplete, and 
 have created expectations of the future advent of some other as its Head. 
 Without a personal centre round which to gather, all that He had done 
 would speedily fade away. He Himself, in the matchless beauty of His 
 life, and the infinite attractiveness of His self-sacrificing death, must 
 necessarily be the abiding soul of the New Society through all ages, for its 
 fundamental principle, from the first, had been personal love towards Him. 
 His words. His whole life. His voluntary humiliation, the transcendent 
 self-restraint and self-denial which had used unlimited supernatural power 
 only for others, and had submitted to poverty, obscurity, and opposition, 
 erelong to culminate in the endurance of a violent death for the good of 
 mankind, raised Him to a Divine and perfect ideal of love and goodness, 
 which, of itself, proclaimed Him the King — that is, the Messiah — in the 
 new kingdom He had founded. " The love of Christ " was to be the 
 watchword of His followers in all ages ; the sentiment that would nerve 
 them to endure triumphantly the bitterest persecutions, and even death ; 
 that would constrain them to life-long devotion to His cause, in obedience 
 to His commands, and in imitation of His example. The words of a future 
 disciple, St. Paul, would be only the utterance of all others worthy the 
 name, in every age: "The love of Christ constraineth us." With St. John, 
 they would " love Him because He first loved us." He had established 
 a kingdom, for the first and only time in history, on personal love to the 
 founder, and it was necessary that He should definitely reveal Himself in 
 His spiritual relation to it as, henceforth, its recognised Messiah-King. 
 
 A crisis so momentous in the development of His great work must have 
 profoundly affected a nature, sensitive and holy, like His. His whole 
 life was an unbroken communion with His Father in Heaven, but there 
 were moments when this passion of the soul appeared to grow more 
 intense. His human weakness, though unstained by evil, was fain to 
 strengthen itself by drawing near to His Father above, with whom every 
 beat of His thoughts moved in undisturbed and awful harmony. In all 
 His temptations, He had ever betaken Himself to prayer, and this was a
 
 502 THE LIFE OF CHKIST. 
 
 moment of unspeakable sublimity. For Israel had now rejected Him, and 
 there rose before Him only the vision of the (yross. Plis Kingdom, more 
 clearly than ever, was to go forth to conquer the world, from the gates of 
 His opened grave, and He had, therefore, while yet with them, to take His 
 seat as the Messiah-King among those in whom that kingdom saw i'jS first 
 subjects. 
 
 He had, thus, been absorbed in thought and separated in fervent prayer, 
 as they passed from town to town on His northward journey, until at lasfc 
 they reached the neighboiirhood of Cassarea Philippi. There, He once more 
 went aside, in some lonely spot among the rich wooded valleys, for solitary 
 devotion. Before He returned to the Twelve, He had determined to delay 
 no longer a full self-revelation ; to throw aside the veil, and openly assume 
 the Messiahship Avhich had long been silently ascribed to Him in His little 
 circle, and as silently accepted, without a formal and definite investiture. 
 
 " Wliom do men say that I, the Son of man, am ? " sufficed to introduce 
 the momentous topic. The answer showed how little He had been under- 
 stood, and how utterly the fixed national idea of a Messiah had darkened 
 the general mind. " Some say, with Antipas, the spirit of John the Baptist 
 has entered Thee, and that Thou workest through it, or that Thou art Johrj 
 himself, risen from the dead, and appearing under another name ; some, 
 that Thou art Elias, who, like Enoch, has never died, but was taken up alive 
 to heaven, and has now returned in the body, as Malachi predicted, to prc- 
 pai-e for the Messiah ; some, that Thou art Jeremiah, come to reveal the 
 Ark and the sacred vessels which he hid in Mount Nebo, and thus in- 
 augurate the approaching reign of the Messiah ; or one of the prophets, 
 sent from the other world by God, as a herald of the Coming One." They 
 could not add that any regarded Him as the Messiah. His refusal to 
 appeal to force, and head a political revolution, had caused an almost 
 universal repudiation of the thought. 
 
 Jesus expressed neither sorrow nor displeasui^e at such an utter failure 
 to recognise His true character and dignity. He had been the subject of 
 the keenest interest and discussion, from His relation to the Expected 
 One, and this, of itself, promised a rich result, when His followers, after 
 His departure, directed the minds of men to a clearer conception of the 
 Messianic kingdom. He Himself knew His rightful glory and was un- 
 affected by any popular judgment. But He had now to obtain from the 
 lips of the Twelve— the special witnesses of His life and daily words— a 
 higher confession, which He knew they only needed a question from Him 
 to utter gladly. " But whom say ye that I am ? " Instantly from the lips 
 of Simon Peter, the impulsive, tender, loving, rock-like disciple, came all 
 that the full heart of his Master waited to hear. " Thou, my Master and 
 Lord," said he, doubtless with beaming joy, " Thou art the Christ— Antah 
 Meschicha— the son of the living God." Thus, in the outskirts of the 
 heathen town dedicated to the deified Augustus, Jesus was proclaimed, 
 with no preparatory circumstance, in the privacy of a small band of 
 GalilaBan fishermen, as the King of the Universal Israel ; here, a fugitive 
 whose only earthly crown was to be the one of thorns. He assumed publicly 
 the empire of all the world, as the Messiah of God.
 
 IN FLIGHT ONCE MOEE. 503 
 
 The gi'eatness and significance of this confession of Peter, made in the 
 name of the Twelve, cannot be exaggerated. It was a striking advance 
 towards realizing the great truth of the Incarnation, and the clear in- 
 telligence would one day follow the open and ardent utterance of the heart. 
 Hitherto Jesus had revealed Himself chiefly as the " Son of man," and " the 
 Son of God ; " but He now received from those who had been constantly 
 with Him, as a faint acknowledgment of the conviction wrought by His 
 life and words and mighty works, the formal inauguration as the Messiah- 
 King of a spiritual and deathless emjjire. ISTathanael had, indeed, antici- 
 pated the great confession at the opening of His ministry, and the disciples 
 had recognised Him as the Son of God, on that wild night when they 
 found that the form walking on the waves was not the Spirit of the storm, 
 but their loving Master, and when the very winds and waves were seen 
 to obey Him. But the time was not then ripe for His definite installation 
 as Messiah, and the incidents passed off. Simon, also, had cheered His 
 troubled soul, when the great secession of the disciples took place at 
 Capernaum, by an anticipation of His confession at Ctesarea Philippi, but 
 He had, as it were, waived it aside. Now, however, He formally accepted 
 what, hitherto. He had silently allowed ; for the hour had come. 
 
 " Blessed arb thou, Simon Barjona," said He ; " flesh and blood hath not 
 revealed this to you ; you have not learned it from my lowly outward form, 
 and it has come to you from no human teaching ; my Father in Heaven has 
 disclosed it to you." As a deliberate confession of faith it was, indeed, 
 amazing. The Twelve had been the daily witnesses of the human simplicity 
 and poverty of His life. His homelessness. His weary wanderings afoot, 
 and all the circumstances of His constant humiliation, which might well 
 have counterbalanced the great memories their privileged intimacy had 
 afforded, a,nd obscured their spiritual significance. These last months had, 
 moreover, surrounded Him with all the depreciations of a fugitive life. 
 Yet the Apostles broke through the hereditary prejudice of their race, 
 with whom tradition and absolute uniformity in religious things had an 
 inconceivable power, — tlicy disregarded the judgment of their spiritual 
 rulers and leaders ; rising above the utmost ideas of those around ; and 
 had seen, in their lowly rejected Master, the true Lord of the New King- 
 dom of God. Nor is the fact less wonderful that the life and words of 
 Jesus, seen thus closely, should have created such a lofty and holy concep- 
 tion of His spiritual greatness, amidst all the counteractions of outward 
 fact and daily familiarity. In spite of all. He was the Malka Meschicha — 
 the King-Messiah — to those who had known Him best. 
 
 The ardent, immovable devotion of Peter, the first to own his Master as 
 Messiah, as He had been first in all other utterances of trust and reverence, 
 won for itself an illustrious tribute from Jesus. The weai-y sad heart, 
 that had so much to grieve it, was filled for the time with a pui"e and 
 kingly joy at the proof thus given, that, at last, a true and solid begin 
 ning had been made. He had, doubtless, long yearned for a time when the 
 Twelve would be advanced enough in spiritual things to allow Him to 
 disclose His utmost thoughts and ultimate designs, and this time had now 
 come. He had never yet spoken of the future government or organization
 
 504 THE LIFE OF CimiST. 
 
 of the ISTew Kingdom, as a visible commuuion, and did not propose to lay 
 down any detailed laws even now. He hastened to tell Peter, however, 
 that this Society, — His Chui'ch or congregation, " called out " from the 
 world at larce, would be entrusted to him after His own decease. As 
 buildings in the country around were founded on a rock, that the floods- 
 and storms might not overthrow them, so it would be raised on the rock- 
 like fidelity shown by him in his great confession. 
 
 Turning to him, Christ continued, " I have something to say that con- 
 cerns you. You are to me, as when I first saAV you, — Petros — the rock 
 (potra) which I will make the foundation stone, when my Church, in which 
 my followers will be enrolled, is to be built. In its building you will do 
 me the greatest service, like the stone on which all others rest, itself rest- 
 ing on the fii'm rock beneath — which is myself. On you and such rock- 
 like souls, it will rise, but on you first, and the gates of death will be 
 powerless against it ; for it shall outlive the grave and reach on into 
 eternity. Fast closed as are the gates of the grave, they shall open wide 
 to let forth my followers to the resurrection of the just, nor shall the 
 powers of evil be able to overturn the New Society thus gathered. I have 
 called you the rock on which I shall raise my Church — I call you also the 
 steward, to whom the charge of it is entrusted. As such I shall give you, 
 after my ascent to heaven, the keys of it, to admit such as you think worthy, 
 both Jews and heathen, and to shut out those whom you think unfit. I 
 commit to you, moreover, the government and discipline of its member- 
 ship : whatever you forbid as unbecoming my kingdom, or as unfitting for 
 membership in it, shall be as if forbidden by me, myself, in heaven ; and 
 whatever you permit, as not contrary to its welfare, or not excluding from 
 it, shall be as if I myself permitted it, from above. It will be left to your 
 decision, which will be recognised before God, what may be forbidden, as 
 a hindrance to entry into my Church ou earth, or unworthy of it ; and 
 what may be permitted, as not barring from its membership." How 
 Peter exercised this honour in the Apostolic Church was hereafter to be 
 seen, when he rose as mouthpiece of the eleven in the election of a twelfth ; 
 when he spoke for them on the Day of Pentecost, before the mviltitude, and 
 by his constant mention as chief and foremost of the Apostles. Jesus was 
 almost immediately to extend the same dignity and authority to the whole 
 of the Twelve, but Peter had just precedence in recognition of his worth 
 and character. The figments of Eomau creation, by which, from this 
 tribute to his love and enthusiasm, a vast structure of priestly arrogance 
 and usurpation has been raised, need no notice in this place. 
 
 The ISTew Society was at last formally constituted, and provision made 
 for its government and continuance after its founder's death. Hence- 
 forth, He moved in the midst of the Twelve as the recognised Messiah, of 
 whom they were the fiiture designated envoys. 
 
 But the approaching end of the great drama could not be left untold. 
 Jerusalem was the one spot in which alone the work of Jesus could be com- 
 pleted. Galilee had been only the place of preparation. The Temple and 
 its ministering priests, the Rabbis and the schools, were in the Holy City. 
 David had reigned there, and there must the Messiah be declared, to vindi-
 
 IN FLIGHT ONCE MORE. 505 
 
 cate the honour of God, and prochiim the new spu-itual theocracy in the 
 centre of the religious -world. His work in Galilee Avas virtually over ; for 
 though not finished, it was hopelessly paralysed and checked. He might 
 return, hut it would avail nothing against the conspiracy that everywhere 
 faced Him. But in Jerusalem He had both to begin and to complete His 
 Avork. He must go to the capital, for Galilee was in great measure closed 
 against Him. He had assumed the Messiahship, and He must needs pro- 
 claim it openlj' before His enemies in their stronghold. He knew that 
 only death awaited Him, but that death had been foreseen in the eternal 
 counsels of God as the mysterious atonement for the sins of the world. 
 
 It would have been premature to have spread abroad the momentous 
 incident of the ascription and formal acceptance of the title of Messiah. 
 The Twelve must needs know the great truth, but the multitude must, for 
 a time, be left to their own fancies. He was to be preached as a crucified 
 and risen Saviour, not as a Jewish Messiah, and this could not be till the 
 end had come. Nor did even the Apostles as yet understand the Divine 
 plan of salvation clearly enough, and the Jews, moreover, might have 
 taken advantage of the preaching, for seditious movements. So imperative 
 was temporary secrecy, indeed, that He gave the strictest injunctions that 
 no man should be told what had happened. 
 
 The idea of a suffering Messiah, was, however, so wholly foreign to all 
 prevailing conceptions, that it was indispensable that the catastrophe at 
 Jerusalem, foreseen by Jesus from the first, but now near at hand, should 
 be made familiar to the Twelve, as part of the all-wise purpose of God in 
 the development of the new spiritual kingdom. It has been a disputed 
 point whether any of the Eabbis of Christ's day had thought of the Mes- 
 siah as destined to suffer and die. Beyond question some had applied to 
 Him the passages of Isaiah, which speak of the servant of God as wounded 
 for our transgressions, but it is equally certain that the idea had not only 
 found no general acceptance, but was entirely opposed to the feeling of the 
 nation. From this time, therefore, Jesus began systematically to prepare 
 the Apostles for His approaching violent death, returning to the sad topic 
 at every opportunity ; that a truth so disagreeable and so contrary to their 
 lifelong ideas might gradually become familiar to them ; and that they 
 might come to feel that it was in accordance with the Divine plan of His 
 kingdom. He had spoken of it before, but now threw aside all vagueness, 
 and impressed it on them Avith the utmost distinctness ; doubtless, explain- 
 ing from their own Scriptures, as He did afterwards to the disciples on 
 the way to Emmaus, how the Christ needed to suffer these things, before 
 entering into His glory. To revolutionize fixed belief is never easy, for 
 the will has to be persuaded as well as the understanding. Hitherto, their 
 minds had not been prepared for such a shock, and even yet, as we shall 
 often see, they were very slow to give up their preconceptions, and realize 
 Avhat seemed so contradictory. 
 
 It was impossible, hoAvever, to mistake the warnings of their Master 
 however hard it might be to reconcile them with their oavu ideas. " He 
 must go to Jerusalem," He said, " and suffer many things of the elders, 
 and chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days, rise
 
 506 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 again." But so far were tlie Twelve from comprehending sucli an an- 
 nouncement, that Peter, too impulsive to wait for an opportunity of telling 
 how much it distressed him, could not restrain his feelings. True to his 
 character, he forthwith took Jesus by the hand, and led Him aside, to 
 remonstrate with Him, and dissuade Him from a journey which would 
 have such results. " God keep this evil far from Thee, my Lord and 
 Master," said he. "You must not let such things happen. They will 
 utterly ruin the prospects of your kingdom, for they match ill with the 
 dignity of tlie Messiah. It there be any danger such as you fear, why not 
 use your supernatural power to preserve yourself and us ? It is not to be 
 endured that you should suffer such indignities." It was the very same 
 temptation as the arch-enemy had set before Christ in the Avilderness, — to 
 employ His Divine power for His own advantage, instead of using it, with 
 absolute self-surrender, only to carry out the will of His Father. But, as 
 ever before, it was instantly repelled. His quick, stern answer must have 
 made Peter recoil, afraid. " Get thee behind me," said He, " out of my 
 sight, thou tempter ; thou art laying a snare for me ; thy words show that 
 in these things thou ent^rest not into the thoughts and plans of God, but 
 considerest all things only from the ideas of men, with their dreams of 
 ambition and human advantage." Peter still fancied that Jesus would be 
 an earthly monarcli, and that the proper course to take, under the circum- 
 stances, was to oppose force witli force. He had yet to learn that the 
 kingdom of his Master was to be established by suffering and self-denial. 
 
 It was a moment unspeakably solemn. Even the few faithful ones, and 
 their very Coryphseus— their leader and mouthpiece— while hailing Jesus 
 as the Messiah, clung to the old national ideas, and could not reconcile 
 them with his suffering and dying. He had rebuked the temptation which 
 appealed to Him, as a man, so strongly, to take the ease and glory which 
 invited Him, and to abandon the path of sorrow and lowliness, which 
 might be the spiritual life of the world, but was His own humiliation and 
 martyrdom. It had been driven away from His stainless soul, like dark- 
 ness from the sun, but its power in the minds, even of the Twelve, was 
 only too clear. The truth, in all its repugnancy, must be forced on them 
 more clearly than ever, that they might no longer continue with Him if it 
 offended them ; for He would receive none as His disciples who did not 
 cheerfully embi-ace a career of self-denial and absolute devotion, even to 
 the sacrifice of life, for His sake, with no prospect whatever of earthly 
 reward. Nor would He even accept any one willing, from a mercenary 
 spirit, to suffer here that He might receive a reward hereafter ; for though 
 such a reward was promised to those who were faithful to the end, absolute 
 sincerity was required in His service. It must be the grateful, sponta- 
 neous expression of true love and devotion. 
 
 Even in such an outlying district as that of Oo3sarea Philippi, numbers 
 of the population — for there were many Jews in the region — had gathered 
 to hear and see Him, and were near at hand at the moment. The test 
 required from the Twelve was no less imperative for these ; the " floor '' 
 must be thoroughly "fanned and cleansed" from all self-deception or 
 designed hypocrisy.
 
 IN FLIGHT ONCE MOKE. 507 
 
 Witliout giving Peter time, therefore, to excuse himself, and leaving him 
 to the shame of his reproof, Jasns called tlic people and the Apostles 
 round Him, and continued the subject on ■which He had begun to speak. 
 
 " 1 must needs suffer," said He, " before I enter into my glory, but so 
 must all who would be my followers. If any man propose to be my dis- 
 ciple, he must literally follow me in my path of humiliation and sorrow. 
 Wbatevcr would hinder absolute devotion and self-sacrifice must be given 
 up. He must make me his one aim. All that stands in the way of undi- 
 vided loyalty to me— the love of ease, of pleasure, and even of life — must 
 be surrendered. The hopes and prospects which engage other men must 
 be abandoned, and in their stead he must daily take up the sufferings and 
 self-denials which come on him for my sake, and bear tliem, as a man 
 condemned to death bears the cross on which he is to die. I have set, and 
 shall set him, the example I require him to follow. Any one who thinks 
 he can be my disciple, and enter into my kingdom hereafter, and yet carry 
 himself so in this evil time as to escape suffering and enjoy life and its 
 comforts, deceives himself. If he seek this life by denying my name, as 
 he must needs do, in this age, to escape persecution, he will lose life eternal. 
 But he who is willing, for my sake, to sacrifice his natural desire for plea- 
 sure and ease, and even to give up life itself, if required, will assuredly 
 receive everlasting life when I come in my kingdom. Hard though this 
 seem, it is the wisest and best thing you can do to comply heartily with it- 
 What has a man in the end if, by denying me for his worldly interests, he 
 gain even the whole world, and lose that existence which alone is worthy 
 the name ? Unprepared for the eternal life of my kingdom, and without 
 a share in it ; with his breath he loses not only all that he has, but himself 
 as well. What gain here will repay him for the loss of the life hereafter ? 
 
 " I say this on good grounds, and with absolute truth. For, though now 
 only a man like yourselves, I shall one day return in a very different form, 
 with the majesty of my Father in heaven, and accompanied by legions of 
 angels, to recompense every one according to his works. In that day each 
 true disciple will be rewarded according to his loving devotion and self- 
 sacrifice for my sake, and will be received by me, as the Messiah, into my 
 kingdom. But I shall be ashamed of any one, and count him unfit to 
 enter that kingdom, who for love of life and ease, or for fear of man, or 
 from shame of my present lowly estate, or of my cross, has wanted courage 
 and heart to confess me openly, and separate himself, for love to me, 
 from this sinful generation. It may be hard for you to think, as you see 
 me standing here before j'ou, that I shall one day come in heavenly 
 majesty ; but that you may know how surely it will be so, I shall grar.t to 
 some of you now present, a glimpse of this majesty, not after my death, 
 but while I am still with you, that they may see me, the Son of man, in 
 the glory in which I will come when I return to enter on my kingdom."
 
 503 TUE LIFE 0-E CHEIST. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVII. 
 
 THE TKANSFIGURATION. 
 
 JESUS had now utterly broken with the past. Hitherto He had been 
 slowly educating the Twelve to right conceptions of Himself and His 
 great work, and in doing so had had to oppose their stubborn prejudice, 
 enlighten their ignorance, illustrate His meaning by significant acts, resist 
 the sophistry and superficial literalism of the Rabbis, and lead the way 
 to a higher spiritual ideal and life by His own daily example and words. 
 They had now been in His society, however, for over two years, and, at 
 last, had risen to a more just estimate of His dignity and of the nature 
 of His work. He was henceforth free from the anxiety which had been 
 inevitable so long as nothing had been definitely accomplished towards 
 the perpetuity of His Kingdom ; for the confession of Peter, in the name 
 of his brethren, was the assurance that that kingdom would outlive His 
 own death, and spread ever more widely through an unending future. 
 The joy of victory filled His soul, though the Cross was already near at 
 hand. Henceforth He bore Himself as soon to leave the circle with whom 
 He had dwelt so long; now, preparing them for His humiliation by show- 
 ing its Divine necessity; now, uttering His deepest thoughts on the things 
 of His kingdom ; now, kindling their hearts by visions of the joy that 
 would spread over all nations through the Gospel they were to preach- 
 The future alone filled His heart and mind. 
 
 His gladness of soul at Peter's confession had, like all human raptures, 
 been tempered by shadow. He had read the hearts of the Twelve, and 
 saw that, though they had approached the truth in their conception of the 
 Messiah, they were still Jews, in linking with it the expectation of an 
 earthly political kingdom, with its ambitions and worldly satisfactions. 
 They had risen above the difficulties that blinded the nation ; the thought 
 of ]S"azareth — Galilee — human relationship — lowly position — human wants 
 — rejection by the Rabbis — familiar intercourse with the "unclean" multi- 
 tude, and much beside, that had been a stumbling block to others ;_but it 
 was hard for them, in the presence of one who, to outward apf^rance, 
 was only a man, to realize that He was also the only-begotten Son of God 
 and, like His Father, Divine. 
 
 The announcement that He was to enter into Plis glory as Messiah, by 
 suffering shame and death, not only shocked all their preconceptions : 
 they could not understand it, and were sorely discouraged. They needed 
 to be cheei-ed in their despondency, and led gradually to accept the dis- 
 closure of His approaching humiliation. His promise that some of them, 
 before their death, should see His kingdom come with power, was doubt- 
 less treasured in their hearts ; but tliey little thought its fulfilment was 
 so near. 
 
 Six days passed; or eight, including the first and last; days full, 
 no doubt, of sad and grave, as well as joyous, thoughts ; sad that their 
 Master spoke of suffering violence, and death ; grave that He should not 
 only have dashed all their hopes of a national regeneration, but should
 
 THE TEANSFIGUEATION. 509 
 
 have painted tlieir own futnre in colours so sombre; yet joyons, amidst 
 all, in vague anticipations of the predicted spiritual grandeur of the New 
 Kingdom, of which they were to be heralds. Little by little, they would 
 be sure to catch more of His spirit from daily intercourse with Him, and 
 learn imperceptibly how the purest joy and the noblest glory come from 
 self-sacrihcing love ; how, in the highest sense, it is more blessed to give 
 than to receive. We are told nothing of this sacred interval, but may well 
 conjecture how it passed. 
 
 The scene of the Transfiguration, like that of nearly all other incidents 
 in the life of our Lord, is not minutely stated. St. Luke, indeed, calls it 
 " The Mountain," but gives it no closer name. It seems, however, certain, 
 that the tradition is incorrect, which from the days of St. Jerome has 
 pointed to Mount Tabor as the locality. The summit of that hill — an 
 irregular platform, embracing a circuit of half an hour's walk— was forti- 
 fied, apparently from the earliest ages, and Josephus mentions, about a.d. 
 60, that he strengthened the defences of a city built on it. Picturesque, 
 therefore, though the hill looks, as a traveller approaches it over the wide 
 plain of Esdraelon, it could not have been the spot where Jesus revealed 
 His glory, for it could not offer the seclusion and isolation indicated in 
 the Gospels. Nor is there any reason to think that the Twelve and their 
 Master had left the neighbourhood of Cassarea Philipjii, for St. Mark 
 expressly mentions that they did not start for Galilee till at least the 
 day after. 
 
 It must have been, therefore, on one of the sj^^^rs of Hermon, " the lofty 
 mountain," near which He then found Himself, that the Transfiguration 
 took place. Brought up among the hills, such a region, with distant sum- 
 mits, white in s^Dots with snow even in summer, its pure air, and the soli- 
 tude of woody slopes and shady valleys, must have breathed on the wearied 
 and troubled spirit of our Lord, an ethereal calm and deep peaceful joy, 
 seldom felt amidst the abodes of men. 
 
 Taking the three of His little band most closely in symjiathy with Him, 
 and most able to receive the disclosures that might be made to them. He 
 ascended into the hills towards evening, for silent prayer. The favoured 
 friends were Peter, the rock-like, His host at Capernaum from the first ; 
 and the two Sons of Thunder, John and James ; loved disciples both, but 
 John, the younger, nearest his Master's heart of all the Twelve, as most 
 like Himself in spirit. They had been singled out, already, for similar 
 especial honour, for they alone had entered the death-chamber in the house 
 of Jairus, and they were, hereafter, to be the only witnesses of the awful 
 sorrow of Gethsemane. 
 
 Evening fell while Jesus poured out His soul in high communion with 
 His Father, and the three, lia;ving finished their nightly devotions, had 
 wrapped themselves in their abbas and lain down on the hill-side, to sleep. 
 Meanwhile their Master continued in prayer. His whole soul filled with 
 the crisis so fast approaching. He had taken the three with Him, to over- 
 come their dread of His death and repugnance to the thought of it, as 
 unbefitting the Messiah ; to strengthen them to bear the sight of His 
 humiliation hereafter; a-nd to give them an earnest of the glory into which
 
 510 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 He would enter after His decease, and thus teach them that, though unseen, 
 He was, more than ever, mighty to help. He was about to receive a solemn 
 consecration for the Cross, but, with it, a strong support to His soul in 
 the prospect of such a death. He was a man like ourselves, and His 
 nature, now in its high pi'ime, and delighting in life, must have shrunk 
 from the thought of dying. The prolonged agony and shame of so painful 
 
 I and ignominious an end, must have clouded His spirit at times ; but, above 
 all, who can conceive the moral suffering that must have been in the 
 thought that, though the Holy One, He was to be made an offering for sin! 
 that, though filled with unutterable love to His people. He was to die at 
 their hands as their enemy ; that, though innocent and stainless. He was 
 to suffer as a criminal ; that, though the beloved Son of God, Ho was to 
 be condemned as a blasphemer ? As He continued praying, His soul rose 
 above all earthly sorrows. Drawn forth by the nearness of His Heavenly 
 Father, the Divinity within shone through the veiling flesh till His rai- 
 ment kindled to the dazzling brightness of light, or of the glittering snow 
 on the peaks above Him, and His face glowed with a sunlike majesty. 
 Amidst such an effulgence it was impossible the three could sleep. Eoused 
 by the splendour, they gazed, awe-struck, at the wonder, when, lo ! two 
 liuman forms, in glory like that of the angels, stood by His side — Moses 
 and Elijah, the founder, and the great defender, of the Old Economy, 
 which He had come at once to supersede and to fulfil. Their presence 
 from the upper world was a symbol that the Law and the Prophets hence- 
 forth gave place to a higher Dispensation ; but they had also another 
 mission. They had passed through death, or, at least, from life, and knew 
 the triumph that lay beyond mortality to tlie faithful servants of God. 
 Who could speak to Him as they, of His decease which He should accom- 
 plish at Jerusalem, and temper the gloom of its anticipation ? Their 
 
 \ presence S2:)oke of the grave conquered, and of the eternal glory bej^ond. 
 The empty tomb under Mount Abarim, and the horses and chariot of Elijah, 
 dispelled all fears of the future, and instantly banished all human weak- 
 ness. That His Eternal Father should have honoured and cheered Him by 
 such an embassy at such a time, girt His soul to the joyful acceptance 
 of the awful task of redemption. Human agitation and spiritual conflict 
 passed away, to return no more in their bitterness till the night before 
 Calvary. His whole nature rose to the height of His great enterprise. 
 Henceforth His one thought was to finish the work His Father had given 
 Him to do. 
 
 Meanwhile, the three Apostles, dazzled, confused, and lost in wonder, 
 gazed silently on the amazing sight, and listened. But it is not given to 
 earth to have more than brief glimpses of Heaven. Moses and Elijah had 
 erelong finished their mission, and were about to return to the presence 
 of God. Could they not lie induced to stay awhile ? Peter, ever first to 
 speak, and hardly knowing, in his confusion, what he said, would at least 
 try to prolong such an interview. " Master," said he, to amplify his words, 
 " it is good for us to be here ; let us gather some branches from the slopes 
 around, and put up three booths, like those of the Feast of Tabernacles ; 
 one for Thee, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." The cares and troubles
 
 THE TRANSFIGUEATION. 511 
 
 of his waiidcriug life, and all his gloomy forebodings for his Master and 
 himself, had faded away before such brightness and joy, and, in his fond 
 childlike simplicity, he dreamed of lengthening out tlie delight. 
 
 The Almighty had come down of old, to Mount Sinai, in blackness, and 
 darkness, and tempest ; but now, a bright cloud descended from the clear 
 Bky, like that from which He had of old spoken to Moses at the door of the 
 Tabernacle, and overshadowed Jesus and the two heavenly visitors, filling 
 the three Apostles with fear, as they saw it spread round and over their 
 Master, and those with Ilim. It was the symbol of the presence of God, for 
 He, also, had di'awn nigh to bear witness to His Eternal Son. It was not 
 enough that Moses and Elijah had honoured Him — a voice from the midst 
 of the cloud added a still higher testimony : " This is My beloved Son, in 
 whom I am well pleased ; hear ye Him." Such a confirmation of the great 
 confession of Peter was never to be forgotten. Almost a generation later, 
 when he wrote his second Epistle, the rememljrance of this night was as 
 vivid as ever. " We were eye-witnesses," says he, " of His Majesty. For 
 He received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such 
 a voice to Him from the excellent glory, ' This is My beloved Son, in whom 
 I am well pleased ; hear ye Him.' And this voice which came from hea- 
 ven, we heard, when we were with Him in the holy mount." The ]:)right- 
 ness of a vision so amazing lingered in the memory of those who beheld 
 it to the latest day of their lives. 
 
 Sore afraid, the three fell on their faces, for wlio could stand before 
 God P But the Voice had come and gone, and, with it, the cloud and the 
 visitors from the eternal world ; and Jesus was once more alone. Calming 
 their fears by a gentle touch. He bade them " arise and not be afraid," and 
 they found themselves once more alone. Master and followers, with the 
 stars over them, and the silent hills around. The Divine glory had faded 
 from His countenance, and His robes were once more like their own, but 
 they could never forget in what Majesty they had seen Him ; never forget, 
 in His humiliation, that they had heard Him called " the beloved Son," by 
 the lips of the Eternal Himself ; nor could they ever hesitate whom to 
 obey when they had seen Moses and Elijah — representatives of the Law 
 and the Prophets — withdraw before Him, and had heard Him proclaimed 
 from the Cloud of the Presence as far higher than they. God Himself 
 had said, in express words, or in effect, " He who is now with you alone, 
 whose heavenly dignity you have seen. He whom you daily see in His 
 wonted lowliness, is the same, even in this humiliation, as when in the 
 bosom of the Father — ' My Son, who pleases Me always.' Henceforth 
 receive the Law from His lips alone ; henceforth, let all men hear Him 
 only ; He is the Living Voice of the unseen God." 
 
 It was now morning, and the nine were awaiting the return of their 
 Master and His friends. What the conversation was between Jesus and 
 the three, as they descended from the mountain, is not told us. There 
 was, once more, freedom to speak, though, doubtless, they did so with a 
 strange reverence, hardly venturing to talk of what they had seen and 
 heard. Nor could they relieve their miiuls by telling the wonders of the 
 night to the others of the Twelve, for even they were so little prepared for
 
 512 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 such disclosures, that Jesus commanded tliat the vision should be told "to 
 no man, till the Sou of man be risen from the dead." 
 
 It illustrates the difficulty Jesus had to overcome, before new religious 
 ideas could be familiarized to the minds even of those under His con- 
 tinuous teaching, that, though the three had often heard of the resurrec- 
 tion of the dead directly or indirectly from Jesus Himself, they were at a 
 loss to know what the words meant, as He now used them, and disputed 
 among themselves about them. He had told the Jews that if they de- 
 stroyed the Temple of His body. He should raise it again the third day ; 
 and only a week before the Transfiguration, on the day of Peter's memor- 
 able utterance. He had used almost the very words which perjDlexed them 
 now. But though thrice repeated, they were still dark and mysterious. 
 
 The resurrection from the dead was, indeed, an article of the current 
 Jewish theology, but it was so taught by the Eabbis, that the three found 
 it hard to reconcile their previous ideas with the language of Jesus. They 
 had heard from some of the preachers in the synagogues, that Israel alone 
 would rise ; from others, that the resurrection would include godly 
 heathen also, who had kept the seven commands given to the sons of 
 Noah ; from some, that all the heathen outside the Holy Land would be 
 raised, but only to shame and everlasting contempt before Israel; while 
 still others maintained, that neitber the Samaritans, nor the great mass of 
 their own nation, who did not observe the precepts of the Eabbis, would 
 have part in the resurrection. But if there was confusion as to who should 
 rise again, there was still more contradiction between what they had 
 always heard before, of the occasion and time of the resurrection ; and the 
 words that had fallen from Jesus. They had been trained to believe that 
 all Israel would be gathered from the four quarters of the earth, at the 
 coming of the Messiah, and that the dead would be raised immediately 
 after. But before this resurrection, which would thus inaugurate the 
 reign of the Messiah, Elias was first to come, and they still clung to this 
 idea, in spite of all that Jesus had said to remove it. They had alwaysi 
 moreover, heard the synagogue preachers say that the holy dead, when 
 thus raised, were to take part in the kingdom of the Messiah, at Jerusalem, 
 and once more become fellow-citizens with the living. 
 
 At the mention of the resurrection, therefore, the thought instantly rose 
 in their minds, how it could take place when Elijah had not yet ap- 
 peared, and how Jesus could speak of Himself, alone, as rising from the 
 grave, and that on the third day. It was clear there must be some con- 
 tradiction between His words and what they had hitherto been taught. 
 What could He mean by this rising from the dead ? Only He could 
 answer. To solve the point they asked Him, " How is it that our Eabbis 
 say Elias must come before the dead shall be raised— that is, before the 
 opening of the reign of the Messiah, which the resurrection is to announce P 
 You speak of yourself alone, rising from the dead, and that on the third 
 day, and say nothing about this reappearance of Elias, which the Eabbis 
 tell us, is to be three days before the coming of the Messiah. Is it wrong 
 when they say that he will stand on the hills of Israel, and weep and 
 lament over the desolate and forsaken land, till his voice is heard through
 
 THE TRANSFIGCTRATION. 513 
 
 the world, and that he will then ciy to tlic mountains, ' Peace and blessing 
 come into the world, peace and blessing come into the world! ' — ' Salvation 
 cometh, salvation cometh ! ' and gather all the scattered sous of Jacob, and 
 restore all things in Israel as in ancient times ? They affirm that Elias 
 will turn the hearts of all Israel to the Messiah ; how is this to be recon- 
 ciled with your saying that the Messiah must suffer many things of tlie 
 high priests and rulers, and be rejected and put to death ? " 
 
 " You are right," replied Jesus, " when you say that Elias must come 
 before mc, the Messiah. The purpose of God, and ancient prophecy, re- 
 quire it. But, as I, the Son of man, now when I am come, must suffer 
 many things, and be set at nought and rejected, as the prophets have fore- 
 told, although I have given so many proofs of my heavenly mission ; so 
 has it already happened with him who was the Elias sent by my Father to 
 jirej^are my way. He, like myself, has already come, but they knew him 
 as little as they have known me, and they have done to him as their hearts 
 wished. He has suffered even to deatlf, as I, the Messiah, must also 
 suffer." Words so precise could not be misunderstood. They saw that 
 He spoke of John the Baptist. 
 
 Our moments of exaltation and rajjture are only passing, and are often 
 thrown into vivid contrast by the shadows that constantly linger beside 
 the light. When He ascended the mountain with Peter and the sons of 
 Zebcdce, Jesus had left the other disciples at the foot. The night, with 
 its wondrous vision, had passed away, and He was now returning to His 
 little band, who waited for Him in a neighbouring hamlet or village. The 
 Jewish population scattered round Ca3sarea Philippi had already heard of 
 His arrival in their parts, and, from vai'ious motives, had gathered to see 
 and hear Him. Hence no sooner was He seen descending the slopes, than 
 the whole multitude moved in His direction, to meet Him. His sudden 
 appearance was opportune. An incident had just taken place, which was 
 still exciting no little dispute between some scribes and the disciples. A 
 Jew in the crowd had a son — his only child — who had been afflicted from 
 birth with the form of demoiTiac possession shown by epilepsy, joined with 
 madness and want of speech. He had brought him, in the hope that Jesus 
 would heal liim, and the disciples, who had often before wrought similar 
 miracles when sent on missions through the country, had tried, in His 
 absence, to cure the boy, and had failed. It was, indeed, a special case, 
 for the lad was subject to violent convulsions, in which he foamed at the 
 mouth, and gnashed with his teeth, and these had often endangered his 
 life, by coming on him at times when he would have been drowned or 
 burned had not help been near. His whole body, moreover, was withering 
 away under their infl ucnce. 
 
 The failure of the disciples had, apparently, been connected with the 
 excitement and agitations of the last week. Peter's confession in their 
 name, that they ]:)elieved their Master to be the Messiah, had been sadly 
 overcast by the shock to all their previous ideas from His repeated intima- 
 tions of His approaching violent death, and of a similar fate possibly over- 
 taking themselves. It had been a week of spiritual struggle, which Jesus 
 designedly left them to undergo, though He knew, throughout, that one of 
 
 L L
 
 514 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 tlicm would yield to the trial. Tlie nearer the time came for the journey 
 to Judea of which He had si^okcn, and the less they could conceal from 
 themselves that their devotion to Him imperilled their own safety, the 
 more troubled and faltering grew their minds, and this inevitably affected 
 them in all their relations. lu such a hesitating and half- dispirited frame, 
 they had no such triumi^hant faith as when they had gone out on their 
 first independent apostolic mission, and diseases and evil spirits yielded to 
 their commands, in their Leader's name. Hence, they had the mortifica- 
 tion not only of failing to work a cure, Init of having to bear the cavils and 
 sneers of the Eabbis, who were only too glad to seize a momentary triumph 
 at their expense. 
 
 Meanwliile, the people showed Jeans all outAvard respect. The report of 
 His wonderful deeds elsewhere had raised an excitement that was visible 
 on eveiy face. They greeted and welcomed Him, and were impatient to 
 hear what Ho should say in this matter between His followers and their 
 own Doctors. 
 
 Turning to these, now in the flush of victoi'y, Jesus disconcerted them 
 by the simple demand to know the matter in dispute. But tliough they 
 had been bold enough before the humble disciples, they were silent in the 
 commanding presence of the Mastci". 
 
 Presently', the father of the unfortunate boy pressed through the crowd, 
 catching fresh hope that the Teacher could, perhaps, do what the disciples 
 could not. Kneeling before Him, he told all that had happened ; how the 
 disciples had been willing to help, but had failed. The whole story kin- 
 dled Christ's sad indignation. He had been long with both disciples and 
 people, and after all His mighty acts and unwearied teaching, the former 
 had at best a dark and wavering faith, and the latter were ready to reject 
 Him enth'cly. " faithless and perverse generation," cried He, "have ye, 
 then, no faitli at all ? Must I be always present with you? Are all tlie 
 proofs you have had of my help, when absent from you in body, forgotten ? 
 Have not I given you power over demons, and to cure diseases, and pro- 
 mised to be with you, that you might do such wonders .f^ How could you 
 show such want of faith as to doubt ray promises, and think anything too 
 difficult either to attempt or do, whether I am present with you or not? 
 Will you never conquer your unbelief ? How long shall I suffer you ? 
 Where is the boy ? Bring him to me." 
 
 The boy was bi-ought at once ; but his eyes no sooner met those of Jesus 
 than he was seized with a paroxysm of his malady, and fell on the ground, 
 in violent convulsions, and foaming at the mouth. Insane, dumb, and 
 writhing on the earth, no sadder spectacle of the kind could well have 
 been seen. 
 
 It was desirable that the throng around should have the whole incident 
 impressed on their minds, and it was necessary for the permanent good of 
 the agonized father himself that his faith should be strengthened. 
 " How long has he suffered in this way ? " asked Jesus. 
 " Prom childhood, and often the spirit casts him into the water and 
 into the fire, to kill him. But if Thou canst do anytliing at all, have com^ 
 passion on me and liira, and help us."
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION. 515 
 
 " If Thou canst ? " replied Jesus, repeating his words iu gcutle rebuke. 
 "All things are jiossible to him that believes." 
 
 The intense emotion of the father could restrain itself no longer. His 
 son's cure had been made to turn on his own confidence in the Healer, and 
 that, even if sincere, might not be deep enough to secure the favour so 
 unspeakably wished. In his distress he could only break out into the 
 l^itiful cry, which has risen from unnumbered hearts since his day, " Yes, 
 1 believe : help Thou mine unbelief, if my faith is too weak." 
 
 The crowd had been closing in from all sides on Jesus and the unhappy 
 father and son, and further delay was to be avoided. Turning, therefore 
 to the boy, Jesus addressed the demon : " Speechless and deaf spirit, I 
 charge thee, come out of him, and enter uo more into him." A wild shriek 
 and a dreadful convulsion followed, and then the boy lay still and motion- 
 less, so that he seemed dead. Many, indeed, said he was dead. But Jesus 
 took hira by the hand, and, lifting him up, delivered him to his father, 
 amidst the loudly expressed wonder of the multitude at the mighty power 
 of God. 
 
 The disciples, humbled by their failure, and unable, in their sclf-dcceji- 
 tiou, to account for it, took the first opportunity, on their gaining privacy, 
 to ask their Master to what it was owing. " It was simply," said Jesus, 
 " because of your little faith ; indeed, I may say your want of faith ; for 
 I assure you that if you had steadfast, unwavering faith, though ever so 
 small, in my help, and in the power of God, no difficulty would be too great 
 for you to remove. You know how men call overcoming difficulties ' re- 
 moving a mountain; ' I tell you that no mountain of difficulty would be so 
 great — far less this one which foiled you — that it would not, at the word 
 of firm trust in God, be moved out of your way." " As regards this cure," 
 He added, " you had to do with a kind of demoniac possession, which 
 especially demands strong faith, for every attempt to overcome it without 
 such faith as comes through prayer so persistent that it neglects oven the 
 needs of the body for the time, must be fruitless. It never is the great- 
 ness of the difficulty, but only the weakness of your faith, that stands in 
 your way. Eemember this in years to come." 
 
 Jesus did not stay long in the district of Csesarea Philippi, but soon 
 turned once more towards Galilee, probably taking the road hj Dan, 
 across the slopes of Lebanon, with the wild reed-forests of the Huleh 
 marshes on its south side, and on its north the huge mountain masses of 
 Lebanon and Hermou, and the broad, wcll-Avatered sweep of upland valley 
 between. He woidd thus most easily reach the liills of Galilee by an 
 unusual route, and escape the publicity of an approach by the ordinary 
 roads. It was the last time He was to visit the scene of so great a ])arb of 
 His public life, and He felt, as He journeyed on, that He could no more 
 pass from village to village as openly as in days gone by, for the eyes of 
 His enemies were everywhere on Him. The time He had previously given 
 to teaching and healing was now devoted mainly to the special preparation 
 of His disciples for the approaching end. Now and tlicn, when special 
 occasion demanded. He was as ready as ever to relieve the wretched, or to 
 justify aud repeat the words which He had so often dcli^■ered iu the syna-
 
 516 THE LIFE OF CUEIST. 
 
 gogucs ; but He usually shunned notice, not wishing, in the woixls of St. 
 ]\Iark, that any man should know. Avoiding the more populous places, 
 and seeking by-patlis among the hills, where He would meet few and 
 escape notice. He made His way towards His old home, Capernaum. But 
 Ho could no longer show Himself anywhere as He had done in the da}s of 
 His popularity, for every word or act would have created new excitement, 
 and given a fresh ground for accusati on. He had resolved to go to Jeru- 
 salem and there meet His fate, but He could only do this by guarding 
 against anything which might lead to His arrest in Galilee, for in that 
 case He would be tried and condemned by a local court. Jerusalem alone 
 must see the catastrophe, for it was the centre of the nation, the head- 
 quarters of the priesthood and Rabbis, His enemies, and His death there 
 would be distinctly their worlc — their open and formal rejection, as repre- 
 sentatives of the nation, of the ISTcw Kingdom, and of Himself as the 
 Messiah. 
 
 He stayed in Galilee, therefore, only so long as His purpose to go to 
 Jerusalem perinitted, and meanwhile withdrew from public life, to devote 
 Himself especially to the Twelve, and prejiare them for His death, of 
 which He seems to have spoken veiy often. One of the fragments of His 
 intei'course with them, while slowly journeying onwards to His own town, 
 has l)ecn preserved to us. " You have heard," said He, "how the multi- 
 tudes exjiress their amazement at the mighty power of God shown in the 
 miracles they have seen me perform, as in the case of the cure of the boy 
 after my descent from the mount. Let their words, in which they have 
 thus acknowledged and magnified my acts as not less than Divine, sink 
 into your memories, and strengthen and confirm your faith in me as the 
 Messiah. For I, the Son of man — the Messiah — whose mighty works you 
 have heard extolled so greatly, might easily have set myself at the head of 
 the people, and led thorn by supernatural power, as they and their chief 
 incn wish, to outward national glory. But I will assuredly be abandoned 
 by the multitude, and delivered up to the authorities, because I will not 
 use my power for any but holy and spiritual ends. I will be betrayed into 
 the hands of my enemies, and they will put me to death, but I shall rise 
 again on the third day." 
 
 They were too full of their Avorldly hopes, which still mingled strangely 
 with their vague recognition of their Master as the Sou of God, — too un- 
 willing also to think earnestly on a subject so unpleasant, and so opposed 
 to their ideas of the Messiah, — to understand what He meant by these sad 
 forebodings. He needed only to sjDeak the word, and the peoiDle would 
 follow Him, and He might, by His miraculous power, which it seemed to 
 them could not be used for a nobler end, set up the Theocracy, as even 
 John, apparently, had expected lie would. Such language seemed part of 
 His dark sayings, with a secret meaning which He would some day exi:)lain. 
 They would fain have wished this explanation, indeed, at once, to calm 
 their minds, but they hesitated to ask Him for it. He might, perhaps, if 
 they did so, tell them something still more unpleasant, as He had done 
 lately to Peter, in a similar case. Besides, they did not like to think 
 about whatHiey disliked so greatly, and turned from matters which only
 
 BEFORE THE FEAST. 517 
 
 filled thorn witli gloom to others more in keeping with their wishes and 
 hopes. 
 
 These offered themselves in the distinction Jesus often seemed to make 
 in His bearing to one or other of their number. Human nature is always 
 the same, and jealousy was as rife in those daj^s as now. However iiujjar- 
 tially He might treat them, their own characteristics made it impossible 
 that He should be as intimate and confidential with some as with others. 
 In some cases, as at the Transfiguration, He had thought fit to take only a 
 few of them with Him, and He seemed lately to have ]nit especial honour 
 on Peter, while His friendship for John was closer and more tender than 
 for any other. All this, however, would have troubled the less favoured 
 ones little but for their almost invincible belief that He would soon pro- 
 claim Himself as the Messiah in the Jewish sense, and found a great 
 political kingdom. Everything was seen through this preconception, and 
 any marks of preference were taken as indications of future position in 
 the expected revolution. They assumed that, having been chosen from all 
 their countrymen, by Jesus, as His closest followers, they would have the 
 chief places in the new empire He was to found, but there was abundant 
 room for jealousy in their individual claims to this or that prominent 
 dignity. Accustomed to discuss everything openly, they naturally fell 
 into wai'm controversy as to the just distribution of the great offices of 
 state among them, when Jesus should be installed at Jerusalem as Monarch 
 of the world. 
 
 In this dispute, however, their Master took no part. Nor, indeed, did 
 they wish Him to do so, for they had fallen behind, in order that He might 
 not hear them. They were ashamed to have Him know what occupied 
 their thoughts, so little in harmony with His teaching and spirit. But He 
 had noticed all, though He said nothing for the moment. Meanwhile they 
 once more entered Capernaum. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVIII. 
 
 BEFOKE THE TEA ST. 
 
 THERE is something intensely human in the return of Jesus to Caper- 
 naum in the face of imminent danger. It had been His home, and 
 He was in all sinless regards a man. He longed to see the old familiar 
 si)ots once more ; the hills behind the town, among which He had so often 
 wandered ; the shady woods and orchards and vineyards, rich in foliage, 
 or glowing with their ripening fruit in these summer months. He liad 
 often looked out from them on the sparkling waters, and at the clustered 
 houses, which had yielded the few whom He had gathei'ed round Him 
 in His long sojourn as their fellow-citizen. These He would now fain 
 strengthen in their faith, before leaving them for ever. 
 
 His entrance into the town was marked by an application to Peter, 
 by the local collectors of the Temple tax, for its payment by his JMaster. 
 Moses had provided funds for the erection of the Tabernacle, by tho 
 imposition of a tax of half a shekel on each male, payable at the "nam-
 
 518 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 bering of the peoiDle," and this, since the Babylonish Captivity, had been 
 required yearly. It was equal, nominally, to about one and threepence of 
 our money, but really, to at least six times as niTinh, and was demanded 
 from all Israelites of the age of twenty, even the poorest. 
 
 It was mainly from this heavy tax, paid as a sacred duty by every Jew, 
 in whatever country, that the Temple treasury was filled v/ith the millions 
 of silver coins which were so strong a temptation to lawless greed. 
 Crassus, Sabinus, and Pilate, in succession, had laid violent hands on this 
 unmeasured wealth, and the reckless greed of Florus, in its plunder, was 
 the proximate cause of the last great war, which destroyed both Temple 
 and city. 
 
 The Shelihim, or " messengers," who collected this tax in Judea, visited 
 each town at fixed times. In foreign countries, places were appointed for 
 its collection in every city or district where there were Jews — and where 
 were they not ? — the chief men of their community in each acting as 
 treasurer, and conveying the amounts in due course to Jerusalem. Tlu^ee 
 huge chests, carefully guarded in a particular chamber in the Temple, held 
 the yearly receipts, which served, besides providing the beasts for sacrifice, 
 to pay the Rabbis, inspectors of victims, copyists, bakers, judges, and others 
 connected with the Temple service, and numerous women, who wove or 
 washed the Temple linen. It supplied, also, the costs of the water supply, 
 and of the repairs of the vast Temple buildings. 
 
 The collection began in the Holy Land on the 1st of Aclar — part of our 
 February and March — the month of the "returning sun," and the next 
 before that of the Passover. By the middle of it the official exchangers 
 in each town had set up their tables, and opened their two chests for the 
 tax of the current and of the past year, for many paid it for two years 
 together. They supplied for a trifling charge, to all who required it, the 
 old sacred shekel, coined by Simon the Maccabee, for only that coin was 
 received by the Temple authorities, in homage to Pharisaic and national 
 sentiment. At first everything was left to the good will of the people, 
 but after the 25th, prompt payment was required, and securities, such as 
 an under garment, or the like, were taken even from pilgrims coming up 
 to the feast. 
 
 It was very likely, therefore, that the time of grace had expired before 
 Jesus reached Capernaum, so that the collectors — apparently respectable 
 citizens — felt themselves justified in broaching the question to Peter, 
 whether his Teacher did not pay the two drachmas ? Perhaps they fancied 
 He was of the irreconcilable school of Ji;das the Galilasan, who would pay 
 no Temple tax so long as the Holy City Avas polluted by the heathen 
 Roman. His enemies, indeed, had probably insinuated that this was the 
 case, to bring Him into suspicion with the government. 
 
 Peter, ever zealous for his Master's honour, and, as usual, impulsive, no 
 sooner heard the application than he answered affirmatively, on his own 
 authority, and forthwith set oif to find Jesus and report the matter to 
 Him. 
 
 If the exact time for payment had passed while Christ had been away 
 from Capernaum, the collectors were, doubtless, anxious to gather all
 
 BEFORE THE FEAST. 519 
 
 arrears, to take with tliem to Jerusalem at the approachmg Feast of Taber- 
 nacles in September. As if to show that not even the most insignificant 
 matter that concerned His disciples escaped His notice, even when not 
 bodily i^resent with them, Peter no sooner a23peared than He anticipated 
 his errand by asking him his Q^Dinion, whether, when kings levy taxes or 
 tolls, they exacted them from their own children, or only from their 
 subjects ? 
 
 " I think," replied Peter, '"that only the subjects pay." " Then, of course," 
 replied Jesus, " the king's childi^en are free." 
 
 He wished to show that it would have been no failure of duty to leave 
 the tax unpaid. Peter had already owned Hini as the " Son of God," and 
 it was for the Temple of God the impost was levied. It might, therefore, 
 be just and proper to collect it from the nation at large, but it was not 
 fitting to ask it from Him. " I am a king and a king's son; far more than 
 any Eoman or Herodian prince — for I am the Son of God, as thou hast 
 said, and this tax is for the Temj^le of God, my Father, the Great King, 
 and thus I should be free." 
 
 But, while tlius maintaining to His apostle His rightful immunity, he 
 was too prudent to urge it in public. He was not recognised as the Son 
 of God outside the little circle of His disciples, but was only an Israelite, 
 like others, to men at large, and, as such, was under the Law. It would 
 have given ground of accusation and misconception had He hesitated to 
 pay what all Jews gave cheerfully as a religious duty. 
 
 " It would not do for me, nevertheless," continued He, therefore, " to 
 seem to refuse. They would not understand what I have been saying to 
 you. Take your line and go to the lake ; you need not wait till you catch 
 a number of fish to make up the amount. Take the first that comes to 
 your hook, and you will find in its mouth a stater, which is twice as much 
 as is needed. With it you can pay for me and for yourself." 
 
 The result is not given, but there can be no question that tlie command 
 secured its own fulfilment. No lesson could have been given more suited 
 to benefit Peter and his companions. It taught them that, though they 
 were His ai^ostles, they could not claim exemption from labour for their 
 own support, but yet it quickened them to a firm repose on His watchful 
 care, which could heljD them in any extremity. 
 
 They remained for a short time in Capernaum, and, happily, we have a 
 glimpse of their quiet private intercourse ; doubtless the picture of their 
 ordinary life. He had delayed allusion to the hot discussion on the way 
 till the quiet of evening and home. 
 
 •' Tell me," said He, turning to one of them, " about what were you dis- 
 puting among yourselves on the road." But the question received no 
 answer, for all were alike ashamed of their unworthy jealousies and 
 ambitions, and sat liumbled and silent. 
 
 It was an opportunity for impressing on them once more the funda- 
 mental characteristic of His kingdom. Their daily work, as disciples, 
 reminded them contiimally of their relations to it, and it ah'eady engrossed 
 their thoughts, but they still failed to realize its purely spiritual character. 
 The trials waiting them rendered it, thus, the more necessary to strengthen
 
 520 THE LIFE OP (JHEIEiT. 
 
 and support tliem beforehand, by correcting tbcir misapprehensions, and 
 elevating their tone. 
 
 In the Sermon on the Mount they had heard, if they could have under- 
 stood it, how utterly His kingdom contrasted with all their previous ideas. 
 They had been repeatedly told that moral fitness alone secured entrance to 
 it, and that every external claim — whether the fulfilment of legal duties, 
 or national privilege, or sacred calling, or whatever had hitherto been sup- 
 posed to give a title to membership in the old Theocracy — must be aban- 
 doned as worthless. The reign of God, now ]n'oclaimed, was, in fact, only 
 the homage of the soul, which had prcpai'ed itself, like a purified Temple, 
 by humble repentance and holy life, to be a habitation of His Pleavenly 
 Father. Man must only receive from God ; not pretend to give to Him. 
 
 Citizenship in the New Kingdom of the Messiah was possible only when 
 no thought of claim obtruded. 
 
 It was thus, in effect, simply a reproduction of the spirit of Jesus Him- 
 self that was demanded, for the great characteristic which gave His life 
 its matchless beauty, was His perfect Divine humility. His lowly meek- 
 ness had protected Him at the opening of His ministry, when tempted to 
 self-exaltation ; it had subordinated His own will, as by a law of His being, 
 to that of God; it had opened His heart to the poor of His nation, cast 
 out and despised by the religious pride of the day ; it had made Him, 
 throughout, the friend of the ojspressed, the lowly, and the wretched ; it 
 had led Him, of His free choice, to despise all worldly honour, and it was 
 now bearing Him, with a kingly grandeur, to tlic abasement of the Cross, 
 that He might open to His people, and to mankind, the way to peace with 
 their Father in Heaven, and found a kingdom of holiness, truth, and love ; 
 to ennoble and bless the present, and expand into eternal felicity in the 
 world to come. 
 
 It was vital, therefore, for His disciples, then, as now, that they should 
 have the same heavenly temper. Without it, they could neither be efficient 
 instruments in sjoreadiug His kingdom, nor have any share in it them- 
 selves, for it was, itself, the Kingdom — the reign of God — in the soul. 
 The danger of self-elevation had been greatly increased from the moment 
 when Jesus had accepted from them, at CjEsarea Philippi, their formal as- 
 cription of the Messianic dignity. What seductive dreams lay for Galilasan 
 fishermen in their being commissioned by the Messiah, as His confidential 
 friends, and the first dignitaries of His kingdom ! They had, indeed, 
 heard Jesus speak of suffering a shameful death, as the immediate result 
 of His proclaiming Himself as the Messiah ; but when the mind is alread}' 
 preoccupied by strong views, it is incredibly hard to turn. Even the most 
 discouraging incidents are transformed into supports, or at least argued 
 aside, " Perhaps Jesus had only spoken thus to try them ; jierhaps it was 
 one of the dark sayings He used so often." Their future dignity in the 
 Kingdom had been the topic of constant disputes and discussions, ever 
 since the eventful day at Caasarea Philijipi, Had they not received spiri- 
 tual graces and powers ? For what had they gone through so much toil 
 and danger ? The reward could not be far distant. When it came, which 
 of them should have the first place, and be the Minister of the New Reign ?
 
 BEFORE THE FEAST. 521 
 
 They must be taught how utterly they deceived themselves. 
 
 Jesus had sat down in the house and called the Twelve before putting 
 the question. As they stood round Him — for disciples of a Eabbi always 
 stood when their masters sat down to teach them — His first words scat- 
 tered the whole unworthy dream of their hearts. 
 
 " Whoever of you," said He, " it matters not which, seeks to be before 
 the other, and would distinguish himself in my kingdom, can only do so by 
 cheerfully stooping to render even the humblest services to all the rest. 
 Ho must show himself the willing servant of all, by doing whatever he 
 can to serve the others. He must seek and find his greatness in this 
 lowly humility." 
 
 Such language was well-nigh incomprehensible to men misled by worldly 
 pride and ambition. They were thiidving of themselves rather than of 
 their Master ; of receiving rather than rendering ; of selfish case and 
 honour, rather than loving self-sacrifice, which He had often told them 
 was the condition of their discipleship. Ho, therefore, resolved to bring 
 them to a better frame, and this by au illustration rather than words. 
 They knew, by experience, that even His most unpalatable and His darkest 
 words, had a greater fulness of truth than their imperfect insight could 
 realize. They had, doubtless, also at times, misgivings respecting their 
 dreams of the future, though they could not as jet lay these aside. Some 
 of them had even gone so far as to ask Him the particular dignities He 
 intended for each, that future strife might be checked by an authoritative 
 announcement. 
 
 Calling a little boy of the household ; lifting him in Plis arms, and 
 pressing him fondly to His breast, as if to show how much nearer such 
 an one was to Him than even the Apostles in their present mood. He drew 
 their attention to tlie child. Love of children and of their childish traits, 
 had always marked Him. A child, in His eyes, was a type of humility, — 
 the grace so dear to Him. It raises no overweening claims such as men 
 advance, and accepts all its relations in life as it finds them ; it adapts 
 itself unconsciously to the lowliest and most ungenial lot, and finds hap- 
 piness in it. It is the embodiment of dependence and need; of having 
 nothing, and yet looking with simi:)le trust to a higher than itself. 
 
 The Twelve noted His act with wonder, not knowing what it meant. 
 He now proceeded to explain it. 
 
 " You see this child," said He ; " I tell you solemnly, that, unless you 
 abandon your present worldly ideas and amljitious thoughts, and become 
 as simple and humble, and as lovingly dependent on God as it is on man, 
 you shall not even enter my Kingdom, far less hold a high place in it. 
 You see liow this child has no thought but of perfect loving trust towards 
 me ; how it does not pretend to give the woi'th of what it receives, but 
 opens its whole soul to me with artless innocence. Such sweet humility 
 must be found in him who would seek to be greatest in my New Kingdom, 
 To have the heart of a child is the fixed, abiding, condition of admission, 
 of accepted service, or of honour. This child is willing to be the least of 
 you all, and to serve you all, and, as I have said, whoever of j'ou is like it 
 in this, is the greatest among you. Your ambition must guide itself by
 
 622 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 this rule. Your strife shows that you have not yet rightly gi-aspcd the 
 true nature of my Kingdom. It has no external dignities of power and 
 rank ; for it is a reign of principles, not a worldly dominion. All its 
 members are therefore, brethren, on a footing of pei'fect equality. Any 
 one may, indeed, distinguish himself beyond others, but not by external 
 honour and dignity, as in the kingdom set up by Moses, or as in that of 
 the Messiah expected by the nation. The honours of my Kingdom are 
 won only by spiritual likeness to myself, your example and Master. Self- 
 denial, self-sacrifice, the surrender of joerson and goods for the sake of the 
 brotherhood, unselfish love, are the only path to the highest place." 
 
 He had now answered the question ; but the sight of the child kindled 
 another thought of no less moment. "You are looking for great events, 
 and thinking, with weak pride, of your claims as my followers, and maybe 
 tempted to slight and despise any one as spiritless, and beneath you, who 
 is humble and unassuming, like this child on ray knee. But let me tell 
 you, that any one who honours and receives to his heart even a single 
 child-like soul which delights in meekness and humility, as learned from 
 me, has done the same in spirit, and will receive a like reward as if he had 
 received me myself, and done me personal honour. And since all that is 
 done to me from an honest heart, is homage done to my Father who sent 
 me. Pie Himself will show His approval, for even the humblest that lives, 
 if he be my discijsle, is great and honoured before Him." 
 
 The use of the words "in my name " had, meanwhile, recalled to John 
 " the Son of Thunder," an incident of their recent journey. The Twelve 
 had met, in their way, one casting out devils in the name of Jesus, though 
 he was not one of their company, and instead of " receiving " him, had 
 charged him to desist, because he was not of their own number. John 
 now reported the matter, as if struck by the contrast between his own 
 conduct and the counsel just given. " Forbid him not," replied Jesus. 
 " One Avho, though not of my circle, has yet attained so strong a faith 
 in me that he works miracles through my name, needs not be feared as 
 likely, by any sudden change, to speak against me." The want of for- 
 bearance had sprung from the want of humility, for pride is the special 
 source of impatience. " He who is not against lis," continued Jesus, " is 
 for us." He whom John had treated so harshly had, at least, acted in 
 His name, though perhaps, with a veiy imperfect conception of His true 
 dignity, or of the scojoe and greatness of His work. But he was very dif- 
 ferent from the blasphemers who did not shrink from speaking of the 
 Holy Spirit as a spirit of evil. Moreover, the nearer the end approached, 
 the more needful it was to root out any signs of selfish or haughty feelings 
 in the Twelve, and to lead them to look with kindly eyes on even a partial, 
 if friendly, relationship to Him. He wished them to realize that worthi- 
 ness to rank in the New Society was shown by the goodwill, and trustful, 
 child-like spirit, which led to devotion to Him, rather than by the measure 
 of knowledge evinced. It was of great moment, at this time, to wake 
 kindly and broad-hearted feelings towards any, who, while acting apart, 
 were yet well-disposed. Were He once gone, it would be left to His dis- 
 ciples to continue His work, and it would depend upon them whether the
 
 BEFORE THE FEAST. 523 
 
 Society fouudcd by Him, would be really the beginning of a new epoch in 
 religion, or only a piece of new cloth sewed on an old garment ; whether it 
 would be a Jewish sect or a faith for mankind. 
 
 " No one is to be lightly esteemed," continued Jesus, " who shows you 
 the slightest mark of goodwill or friendship, were it only what all give so 
 readily in these sultry lands, a drink of cold water, when given because 
 you are my disciples. Even this will be rcAvarded by God as an act woi'thy 
 His favour. Nor are you, only, thus honoured. So precious to me is the 
 humble child-like spirit which you are ready to despise, that if any one, 
 by words or deeds, cause even one such soul who believes, to turn away 
 from me; as j-ou were in danger of doing when j-ou forbade the stranger 
 to cast out devils in my name ; it would bo better for him that one of tlie 
 huge mill-stones turned by an ass were hung I'ouud his neck, and he 
 drowned in the depths of the lake, that he might be saved from so great 
 a sin. 
 
 " Alas for the world-wide sorroAv which the sins of many, who will call 
 themselves mine, will cause, by keeping men from me ! They will judge 
 of me by these unworthy followers, and keep aloof from my Kingdom. It 
 cannot, indeed-, be otherwise, for the evil that is in man will make even 
 the name of religion a scandal. But how awful the judgment that awaits 
 him wdio turns another from the way of life ! 
 
 " I have said that it would be better for a man to die than that he should 
 lead another astray. So, whatever may tempt you to sin, and thus bring 
 scandal on my name, had much better be put from you, at any cost. If 
 anything, therefore, however dear to you, incites you to evil, or keeps you 
 from a godly life, thrust it from you. If the most precious members of 
 the body— a foot or a hand — be cut off, to prevent death of the whole ; how 
 much rather should we put away, at any sacriiice, any sins of thought 
 or act, which, by misleading others, would cause us to lose eternal life, 
 and be cast into hell-fire, where the worm never dies, and the fire is not 
 cpienched. 
 
 " Every one cast into the fire, which the prophet thus calls unquenchable 
 — every one, that is, who gives himself up to sin — shall certainly suffer 
 the wi'atli of God, and be salted with fire, as the victims on the altar 
 are salted with salt. But every one whose humble and steadfast faith in 
 me has shown him to be, as it were, a pure and worthy sacrifice, fit to be 
 laid on the altar of God, will, on his entrance into the heavenly kingdom of 
 the Messiah, be salted, not with fire, but with the gift of higher grace, 
 that he may endure unto life eternal. Salt is of value to prevent corrup- 
 tion, and I have, before now, called you 'the salt of the earth ; ' because, if 
 you are my true disciples, you will arrest the corruption that prevails 
 among men, and make the community sound. How dreadful, however, if 
 you, the salt, lose your savour ! How will you regain it ? If you turn to 
 evil, and, through sloth or faint-heartedness, be untrue to your calling, how 
 can your needful energy and efficiency be restored ? You wish to be 
 accepted at last as pure and worthy offerings to God, and to receive the 
 gift of heavenly wisdom, which is everlasting life. To attain it, take care 
 to guard the salt of true wisdom, which has been already given you — the
 
 524 THE LIFE OF UlIUIST. 
 
 grace bestowed on you to be my disciples. Remember, moreover, that salt 
 is the symbol of peace ; be at peace among yourselves, and do not di.spute 
 and argue as you have been doing, lest you lose t])e power and fruits of 
 my teaching." 
 
 Jesus had for the time digressed from His original subject — the humble 
 and child-like amono; His followers — but now returned to it. 
 
 " Respecting those little ones of whom I was speaking — lowly, self-dis- 
 trustful ; weak yet it may ])e in faith, as little children are in strength — I 
 would further say : Take heed that ye do not slight or contemn any one of 
 them, for I tell you, so greatly honoured and so dear are they in the sight 
 of God, that the humblest of them, for their very humility, are placed by 
 Him under the loving care of the highest angels, who stand before Him, 
 and see His face continually. Glorious though all angels be, only such 
 exalted spirits— the princes of heaven— are thought worthy, by God, to 
 minister to them and protect them. 
 
 To slight or despise even one such would, indeed, be to undo, so far, the 
 very end for which I have come as the Messiah. You may, by doing so, 
 turn him away from me, and so cause his soul to bo lost. Much i-ather, if 
 you. meet with a humble spirit, still weak in the faith, which has gone 
 astray, should you do your utmost to bring it back. For what shepherd 
 feeding, it may be, a hundred sheep, in our upland pastures, if one of 
 them stray, does not leave the ninety and nine, and set off into the hills to 
 seek for the one that has wandered ? And if he be so happy as to find it, 
 I say to you, beyond doubt he rejoices more over the one thus saved than 
 over the ninety and nine that had not strayed. In the same way as it 
 grieves the shepherd if even one of his sheep should be lost, so it grieves 
 my Father in Heaven that one of these feeble, simple souls should perish, 
 and it sorely displeases Him if it do so by the neglect or fault of any of 
 my disciples. 
 
 " Let me pass to a distinct, yet related subject — the proper treatment of a 
 brother in the faith who does you any wrong, by anger, envy, selfishness, 
 or in any other way. Do not wait till he who has thus injured you comes 
 to you to make amends, but go to him by yourself, and tell him his fault 
 in private ; that, if possible, you may get him to own it between you and 
 him alone, and thus the scandal of difference between disciples spread no 
 farther, and he be won for my New Kingdom, from which he would have 
 been shut out, if, by refusing to be reconciled, he had shown no repentance. 
 Seek his good, not your own justification merely ; however wronged, think 
 less of yourself than of his eternal salvation. 
 
 " If, however, he will not listen to your kindly remonstrance and per- 
 suasion, go a second time to him, taking two or three witnesses Avith you, 
 as Moses directed in other cases ; if, perchance, though he has not been 
 moved by your single api^eal, that of two or three, sujiporting you, may 
 lead him to see and acknowledge his fault. Their testimony, besides, Avill 
 prevent his denial of his confession, should he make one, and afterAvards 
 repudiate it ; AAdiile, if he refuse to listen and to admit his fault, and the 
 matter must be brought before the Assemblj^ it Avill establish and confirm 
 at once the fact of your private visit for attempted reconciliation, and his
 
 BEFOEE THE FEAST. 525 
 
 stuljboru refusal to hear even the two or three brethren taken with you 
 on the second visit. 
 
 " The Rabbis enjoin that the offender shall go to him whom he has 
 injured, and own his fault, and that if he cannot thus procm-e forgiveness, 
 he shall take others with him and seek to obtain it ; but I require that he 
 who is wronged do this, that he may show his humility and his patient 
 love for a guilty brother. 
 
 " You know, moreover, how a stubborn offender, who refuses private 
 amends, is at last publicly reproved in the synagogue and in the schools. 
 In my new society, the congregation of the new Israel — the Kahal, or 
 assembly of my followers, which will, hereafter, be called the Churcb, — 
 is to make a third, final, attempt to win the guilty one to repentance. You 
 are to tell the facts to the ' congregation,' and ask their godly offices, and 
 they, through appointed representatives, will then seek to bring him to a 
 right frame of mind. If, after all, he refuse to hear even the congregation, 
 you are freed from further responsibility, and are absolved from all future 
 religious relationship to him ; as you have hitherto thought yourselves to 
 be from the heathen, and from men of vicious life, such as the publicans. 
 Not that you are to despise him, or refuse him the common offices of 
 humanity, as your countrymen do to such classes ; yoii are still to love 
 and seek to wiu him back, even till the very last, as your Heavenly Father 
 does with the unthankful and evil. 
 
 " Let every offender think how solemn his position will be if thus obdu- 
 rate before the congregation. I have already given Peter — as the key- 
 bearer of my spiritual Temple, the New Society I have founded — power to 
 forbid and allow, to enact and define, what is needed for its future govern- 
 ment and discipline, and have told you that what he ordains, so far as it is 
 in harmony with the mind of the Spirit of God, will be confirmed by mo 
 in heaven, as if I were still with you on earth. This power I now extend 
 to you all, my twelve faithful followers, and I give you, as a body, the 
 same assurance of my coiifirmation of what you appoint for the govern- 
 ment of my Society. Peter is, thus, oaly the first among equals. If the 
 remedy I have jiointed out be insufficient to meet such offences as my 
 Kingdom extends, I leave it to you to devise and apply what other means 
 may seem needed, as the occasion demands. And that you may feel how 
 formally and solemnly I now, before my departure, depute this power to 
 you, I tell you, further, that if two of you shall agree on any matter, thus 
 affecting the salvation of souls by the right discipline of my Church, or 
 for other good ends, and shall ask my Father in Heaven to grant your 
 desire. He will do so. For where two or three of you are gathered together 
 in my name, I am in their midst, so that you need not doubt my promise, 
 that what even so few agree to ask my Father, in matters pertaining to 
 my Kingdom, will be granted." 
 
 The Twelve had listened to their Master in reverent silence, but now 
 the ever self -asserting Peter, still intensely Jewish in feeling, interrupted 
 Him by a question conceived in the narrow and formal spirit of Eab- 
 biuism. 
 
 "Lord,"' said he, "our teachers tell us that if a person do us wrong we
 
 526 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 arc to forgive him, a first., secoud, and third time, but uoL a fourth. What 
 sayest Thou ? WoukI seven times be enough ?" 
 
 " I am far from limiting my requirement to seven times," i-cplied Jesus. 
 " Instead of that, if you be of a truly humble and child-like spirit, as you 
 ought, you will forgive to seventy times seven — that is, any number of 
 times. Let me show you my thoughts on this point by a parable. 
 
 " The subjects of my kingdom are like the servants of a certain ruler, 
 with whom their lord would make a reckoning. So he called before him 
 his revenue collectors, the gatherers of his taxes and tolls, and domandcd 
 a settlement from them. Among others, one was brought to him who 
 owed him ten thousand talents — that is, thirty millions of shekels — a sura 
 it was hopeless for him to think of repaying. When the king heard how 
 much he owed, he cried out that ' he ivould be paid,' and commanded him 
 to be sold as a slave, with his wife and children, and all that he had, in 
 satisfaction of the debt. Hearing this, the servant fell down before him, 
 beseeching him, 'Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.' At 
 this his lord was moved with compassion, and having ordered him to be 
 unbound, not only gave him time, as he had asked, but, knowing he could 
 never pay, forgave him the debt altogether. 
 
 " This servant, however, thus freely forgiven, went out and found one of 
 his fellow-sei'vants who owed him a hundred denarii — less than the seven 
 hundred-thousandth of what he had himself owed — and laid hold of him 
 by the throat, saying fiercely, ' Pay what you owe.' The debtor thereupon 
 fell down at his feet, as he had fallen at those of his lord, and besought 
 him, 'Have patience with mc, and T will pay thee.' But he had no pity, 
 and cast him into prison, till he should pay the debt. His fellow-servants, 
 seeing what was being done, were troubled at such hardheartedness, and 
 at the ill-treatment of the poor man, and came and told their lord all that 
 had happened. Then the lord, having called the offender, said to him, ' O 
 wicked servant, I forgave you all the great debt you owed me, because you 
 asked me, though you sought only time, not forgiveness. Should not you 
 also have had pity on your fellow- servant, as I had pity on you ? And his 
 lord was indignant, and delivered him over to the torturers, to deal with 
 liim in the prison-house as they thought fit, till he should pay all that was 
 due to hiiu. 
 
 " So, the forgiveness God has gi-anted you, of your great debt to Him, 
 which you could never pay — the guilt of your sins— must lead you from 
 your heart to forgive your brother man, not seven, but any number of 
 times, the far smaller debt he may owe you : for if you do not foi'give him, 
 the wrath of God will burn upon you at the great day, and you will be 
 cast into evei-lasting punishment." 
 
 The transcendent loftiness of Chi'ist's spiritual nature shines out through 
 this whole episode. In His perfect humility. He makes no personal claims. 
 As on every occasion. He declares simplicity, and lowliness, like that of 
 childhood, the mark of true discipleship ; asks no higher or luore signal 
 acknowledgment, as a man, than was to be shown to all others ; and ranks 
 the friendly and kind treatment of any of His followers as if done to Him- 
 self. Ho demands no exclusive honour, but, on the coijtrary, every child-
 
 AT THE FEAST OF TABEENACLES. 527 
 
 like spirit in the kingdom of God has in. His sight a priceloss value, 
 however slight the instance by which its character was shown. The good 
 deed done to the least of His people is considered as personal to Himself. 
 Neither now, nor at any time, does He bear Himself as one to whom all 
 Avere to bow as servants ; He takes His place in the midst of the little 
 l^and round Him, as one who shares with them the highest and holiest 
 joys. Within this circle we ever find Him strengthening and encouraging 
 each to surrender himself for the good of the rest, and to cheer and honour 
 especially, the humljlest, the least esteemed, the most unpretentious ; or, 
 it may be, the mere workers who could not push themselves into notice. 
 Meek and lowly in heart, He was no less of an inflnite pitj*. The New 
 Society, taught by Tlis example and words, learned that they were to re- 
 produce the spirit of little children, in that hitherto unimagined grandeur 
 of humility which almost rejoices to suffer because it gives an opportunity 
 to forgive. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIX. 
 
 AT THE FEAST OF TABEENACLES. 
 
 THE seventh month, Tisri, part of our September and October, " the 
 month of the full streams," and the autumnal equinox, had now come. 
 Nisan, "the flower month," known of old as Abib, "the earing month," 
 had seen the Passover go by without the presence of Jesus. Ijjar, " the 
 beautiful month," with its blossoming trees ; Siwan, " the bright ; " Tam- 
 muz; Ab, " the fruit month ; " and Elul, " the month of wine; " had gone 
 by in the journey to Tyre and Sidon and to Cossarea Philippi. Jesus had 
 now been well-nigh half a year little better than an outlawed fugitive, 
 hiding, in unsuspected districts, from His enemies. The fifteenth day of 
 Tisri was the first of the great harvest feast of the year, that of Taber- 
 nacles ; a time all the more joyful from its coming only four days after the 
 Day of Atonement — the close of the Jewish Lent. Galilee was no longer 
 open to Him, and the Kingdom was yet to be proclaimed in Jerusalem, 
 the haughty city of the Temple aiid of David. He knew that to go there 
 would be, sooner or later, to die ; but, with this clearly before Him, He 
 calmly resolved, at the summons of duty, to transfer the sphere of His 
 activity from the remote and secluded security of the North to the head- 
 quarters of the Rabbis and priests. He had come into the world to be the 
 Lamb of God, bringing salvation to His people and mankind by the pro- 
 clamation of the New Kingdom, sealed with His blood ; and Jerusalem 
 alone, the seat of the dispensation He came to supersede, was the fitting 
 scene for inaugurating the economy that was to take its place. 
 
 He was still in Capernaum when the great caravan of pilgrims began to 
 pass to the feast. His relations, who as yet had declared neither for nor 
 against Him, had, apparently, come over from Nazareth to get Him to go 
 up to Jerusalem with them. They could not ha^e felt any hostility to 
 One whose holy life had passed under their eyes, but, like the nation ab 
 large, they clung to what they had always been taught by the Eabbis, —
 
 528 THE LIFE OF CIIKIST. 
 
 that the Messiah was to restore Israel to national glory, and to transfer 
 the sceptre of universal power fi-om Rome to Jerusalem. In their worldly 
 wisdom they could not understand Him. It seemed to them unwise that 
 He should stay in a corner of the land, if He wished to establish the king- 
 dom of the Messiah. The Eabbis, as He knew, taught that it was to be 
 set up in Jerusalem, and it was clear that it could be extended best from 
 the Holy City, as a centre. Why did He not go up with them now, they 
 asked, to the feast, that all who were friendly to Him, or who might 
 become so, might see His miracles, and thus be constrained to support 
 Him? "Nobody," they urged, "who aimed at being a great national 
 leader, as they fancied He did by His claiming to be the Messiah, could 
 hope for success if all the ' signs ' which were to rally the people round 
 Him, were wrought in an out-of-the-way place like Galilee. He had not 
 been at the last Passover, or at Pentecost, when the people were gathered in 
 the Holy City from all the land, and, indeed, from all the world ; but 
 He might, perhaps, repair this error even yet, if He went up now and dis- 
 played His power to the assembled myriads of Israel. If they accepted 
 Him as Messiah, their very numbers would sweep away the heathen like 
 cliaff before the wind, especially Avhen supported by miraculous help. It 
 v,'as unwise to keep back iu this obscure and hidden district ; He should 
 show Himself openly to the Jewish woild, which He could only do in 
 Jerusalem." 
 
 " You think the present the fit moment for carrying out my plans," said 
 Jesus. "You err. It is not yet the divinely appointed time for my doing 
 this. You may go up openly before all Israel, at any time, because j-ou 
 and they are at one in not receiving me. They have no reason to hate 
 you, nor have the priests and Rabbis, their leaders ; but they hate me, 
 because I, the Light of the World, the true Messiah, on whom all should 
 believe, am a standing protest against them, that they sin in hating and 
 persecuting me as a transgressor of the Law and a blasphemer, because 
 I have witnessed against their corruption and hypocrisy. They wish a 
 political Messiah ; I seek only spiritual ends. Go up, yourselves. The 
 present time does not suit me to go with you." Their hope that He 
 would lift the family to the highest honour, by heading a national Mes- 
 sianic movement, had come to nothing. 
 
 The object of His delay was to avoid going with the great Galilasan 
 caravan, which entered the Holy City with public rejoicings. He would 
 be recognised at once, and the multitude, in the excitement of the time, 
 might again try to force Him into political action. Publicity and popular 
 enthusiasm would have drawn the attention of those in power, and this He 
 at present earnestly wished to avoid. His work was not to be rashly 
 broken off by any imprudent act, for He needed all the opportunities that 
 remained, to devote Himself to the Twelve and to His other followers. 
 He could go up a few days later, and thus avoid the caravan. The feast 
 lasted seven days, closing with the eighth as the greatest, and thus, even 
 if He started later. He could mingle with the multitudes, and find out 
 how men felt towards Him and His work, and proclaim the New Kingdom 
 as He saw fit. The danger would be averted, and His great end better
 
 AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 529 
 
 served. It was more in keeping with His spirit to avoid all appearance of 
 courting popularity, and peacefully deliver His great message of love ; 
 leaving its reception to its own charms, and to the lowly humility, self- 
 denial, and gentleness with which it was delivered. 
 
 AVaiting, therefore, for some days, till things were quiet. He started with 
 the Twelve, and a number of disciples, for Jerusalem. Crossing Esdrae- 
 lou, now stripped of its harvest, Eugannim, the " fountain of gardens," 
 saw Him once more on Samaritan soil. The caravans had perhaps gone 
 over the Jordan, to travel down its eastern bank, and thus avoid the 
 pollution of the direct route through hated Samaria. 
 
 He had been kindly received in the alien district on His former passage 
 through it, northwards ; but He was now going towards Jerusalem instead 
 of leaving it, and this was enough to rouse the bitterness of the Sama- 
 ritans. As was His custom, He had sent on messengers before Him to 
 secure hospitality for the night, but it was at once refused. John and 
 James, " the Sons of Thunder," who had perhaps been the messengers, 
 were especially indignant, and showed how little they had profited by the 
 lessons of meekness they had so long been receiving. With the harsh 
 Jewish feeling, which regarded every one except a Jew as accursed and 
 hateful to God, and sought to establish the New Kingdom, not by mildness 
 and love, but by force, they would fain have had fire called down from 
 heaven to consume the unfriendly village. They had pei'haps spoken 
 of Jesus as the Messiah, but, in any case, His fame had, no doubt, already 
 crossed the border. But the Samaritans expected from the Messiah that 
 He would restore the Temple on Mount Gerizim, and instead of that, 
 Jesus was going up to a feast in Jerusalem. John and James, however, 
 could make no allowance. Elijah had once called fire from heaven in his 
 own honour : how much more should men perish who had rejected the 
 Messiah. The teaching of Jesus had not as yet softened the fierce Jewish 
 spirit of the Twelve. Fanatical bitterness had struck its roots into their 
 deepest nature. How utterly were they still wanting in patience towards 
 the erring, and filled only with the thought of -m-ath and destruction ! 
 They had not yet realized th at the Kingdom of Jesus is one of faith alone ; 
 that it cannot be spi'ead by compulsion and violence, but must spring 
 from humility and love; that it must rest on free and honest conviction, 
 and can grow strong and abiding only when received and obeyed in a 
 child-like spirit. 
 
 Deeply troubled, and no less offended, Jesus turned towards the fierce 
 zealots, and rebuked their foolish and cruel harshness. They had heard 
 Him say that He came to serve, not to reign ; to suffer for others, not to 
 inflict suffering on any ; and He had but lately told them, once and again, 
 how He was about to give Himself up to death for the good of the world. 
 But though their ears had heard, and their conscience approved, theii* 
 hearts had not willingly accepted the intimation, and hence they were ever 
 ready to flame out into Jewish fanaticism. Eebuking them sternly, He 
 taught them a needed lesson, by merely passing to another village. 
 
 It was hard for the discii)les to realize that, to be followers of Jesus, 
 they must surrender themselves unconditionally to the will of God, and 
 
 M M
 
 530 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 devote themselves to the work of the Kingdom, without a lingering tic to 
 the world they had left. The circumstances demanded explicit statements 
 of all that discipleship thus involved, and hence, when fresh applicants for 
 the honour presented themselves, Jesus was more frank and earnest, if 
 possible, than ever before, in setting the cost before them. A Samaritan 
 had come forward asking leave to follow Him, as if to show that all were 
 not like the villagers who had treated Him so unkindly. It may be he had 
 very imjoerfect ideas of what his wish implied, but Jesus did not leave him 
 in doubt. He told him His own position, and all that awaited His dis- 
 ciples ; that He had forsaken house and home for ever, and that the birds 
 of the air and the beasts of the field had a lot to be envied compared 
 with His. 
 
 The seeming harshness of His replies to two others, perhaps Samaritans, 
 who also asked leave to follow Him, is explained by these facts. From 
 the first He had held out no rewards, but predicted only privation and 
 suffering to His disciples ; but these were closer at hand now than they 
 had been when He called the Twelve. To follow Him had come to mean, 
 literally, to leave all, and to make up one's mind to the worst. He was a 
 mark for the fiercest hatred of those in authority, and His followers could 
 not escape suffering with their Master, The most utter, unqualified devo- 
 tion, the purest spirit of self-sacrifice, were required. "Let the dead, 
 those who will not receive the preaching of the Kingdom, bury their dead," 
 said He, to one who wished to bury his father. " Surrender yourself ut- 
 terly to God." Another, whose want of the supreme resolution demanded, 
 showed itself in a request to be allowed to bid farewell to his friends, was 
 told that it could not be. " The prayers, the tears of your circle at homo, 
 might shake your decision to consecrate yourself wholly to the kingdom 
 of God." 
 
 It was now many months since the sending out of the Twelve on their 
 first missionary journey. It had been necessary to confine them to strictly 
 Jewish ground, to avoid offence, and from their own defective sympathy 
 with other populations. I3oth difliicultics were now, however, in part re- 
 moved : the openly hostile attitude of the leaders of the nation made it 
 unnecessary to consider their prejudices ; the Apostles had, in some de- 
 gree, gained broader charity; and, above all, the near approach of the end 
 made it desirable that the full grandeur of the New Kingdom, as intended 
 for all men alike, should be clearly shown before its Founder's death, that 
 there might be no possible misconception afterwards. Jesus had always 
 yearned to proclaim the words of life to the different races Avhom He saw 
 around Him. A boundless- field opened itself for the missionary labours 
 of any numl)er of disciples, and He now had round Him a larger number 
 than formerly, whom He could thus emi:)loy. He determined, therefore, to 
 send out no fewer than seventy, which, in Jewish opinion, was the number 
 of the nations of the world. The lesson could not be doubtful. It was a 
 significant announcement that, for the first time in the history of man, 
 a universal religion w^as being proclaimed. 
 
 Samaria, through which He was passing, had naturally the first claim 
 on the new enterprise, and that all the more from the proof of its need
 
 AT THE FEAST OF TABEEISfACLES. 531 
 
 of spiritual light, furnished by the inhospitality shown to Him who was 
 bringing that light to its borders. 
 
 The Seventy, journeying tAvo and two, were directed to carry the mes- 
 sage of jieace to all the habitations of the race they had former]}^ as Jews, 
 so hated. They had grown up from eliildhood in tlie narrowest Pharisaic 
 spirit, and were still, in some measure, under its spell. The Eabl)is did 
 not permit any close intercourse of Jews with heathen or Samaritans ; 
 they were forbidden to enter their houses, or return their greetings, and, 
 still more, to join them in a common meal. But the gi'and maxims of charity 
 and love, which Jesus had so often taught, were now to bo put in practice. 
 Jewish exclusiveness was to be done away for ever, by the proclamation 
 of a Saviour of Mankind. His messengers, therefore, while losing no 
 time on the Avay by long and formal salutations, were to bear themselves 
 with loving trust even among hostile populations, taking neither purse nor 
 wallet, and wearing only the sandals of the poor — to show their lowly 
 spirit, and humble personal claims. The instructions given formerly to 
 the Twelve, were, in fact, repeated ; instructions then as amazing as if 
 Hindoo Brahmins of to-day were sent forth with orders to care nothing 
 for caste, and associate freely, and even eat, with abhorred Pariahs and 
 Sudras. The Seventy were to join, without hesitation or reserve, in the 
 household life of the hated Samaritans, and eat w'ith them at their tables 1 
 ISTo other condition of spiritual brotherhood was to be required than that 
 of a believing reception of the salvation through Jesus. 
 
 Oidy one incident of the journey of Jesus Himself is recorded, but it is 
 wondrously significant. His repulse at the border village had changed 
 His route ; for now, instead of going straight south. He turned eastwards, 
 and followed the road that runs between Samaria and Galilee, down the 
 ravines, to the fertile meadows of Bethshean or Scythopolis, where a ford 
 or brido-e led over the Jordan. The route stretched tlience southwards to 
 Jericho. 
 
 The calm rebuke of John and James for their anger and revengeful 
 spirit, and the return of good for evil in the sending forth the Seventy to 
 preach the Kingdom throughout the Samaritan region, had shown that 
 the rudeness He had received liad not ruffled His spirit. He was now to 
 add another proof of His serene and loving nature. As they approached 
 a border village, a dismal spectacle was presented. Ten men, hideous with 
 leprosy, ranged themselves at a distance from the road, as similar sufferers 
 still do before their huts at the Zion Gate at Jerusalem. It was a law in 
 Samaria that no leper could enter a town, and hence the unfortunate crea- 
 tures accosted Jesus while He was still outside the village. Misery had 
 broken down all prejudice of race or faith, and had brought together even 
 Jew^ and Samaritan, as it still does in the leper haunts of Jerusalem and 
 Nablous. The ten had heard of Jesus, and the wonderful cures He had 
 performed on such as they, and no sooner saw Him than they broke out 
 with the common cry—" Tame ! Tame ! Unclean, unclean ! Jesus, Master, 
 have mercy on us." It was a sight that might have touched any heart» 
 for it must have been like that which still repeats itself to passers-by at 
 the leper quarters elsewhere— a crowd of beggars without eyebrows, or
 
 532 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 hair on tlieir faces or heads ; the nails of their hands and feet, and even a 
 hand or a foot itself, gone from some ; the nose, the eyes, the tongue, the 
 palate, more or less wanting in others. As they stood afar off, their lips 
 covered with their abbas, like mourners for the dead— for they were smit- 
 ten with a living death, which cut them ofE from intercourse with their 
 fellows — the pity of Jesus was excited, and without even waiting to come 
 near, sent hope to them in the words, " Go, show yourselves to the priests." 
 They know what the command meant, for no one who was not cleansed 
 could approach a priest, and as they moved off, the disease left them. The 
 Samaritan would have to show himself to a Samaritan priest ; the nine 
 Jews needed to go up to the Temple at Jerusalem for an official certificate 
 of health ; but it was the least either the one or the others could do, when 
 they felt their cure, to return, if only for a moment, to thank their bene- 
 factor for a deliverance from worse than death. The nine Jews, however, 
 were too concentrated on themselves to think of this. Only one, the Sama- 
 ritan, had natural gratitude enough to come back and throw himself at 
 the feet of Jesus in humble acknowledgment of the goodness shown him. 
 " Were there not ten cleansed ? " asked Christ ; " where are the nine ? 
 The only one who has returned to give glory to God is this Samaritan, 
 whom Jews call a heathen and an alien from Israel. Arise, go thy way, thy 
 faith hath made thee whole." The Twelve had received another lesson of 
 universal charity. 
 
 The Feast of Tabernacles was one of the three great feasts which every 
 Jew was required to attend. It was held from the fifteenth of Tisri to the 
 twenty-second, the first and last days being Sabbaths — the latter "the 
 great day of the feast." It commemorated, in part, the tent-life of Israel 
 in the wilderness, but was also, still more, a feast of thanks for the 
 harvest, which was now ended even in the orchards and vineyards. Every 
 one lived in booths of living twigs— branches of olive, myrtle, fir, and the 
 like — raised in the open covirts of houses, on roofs, and in the streets and 
 open places of the city. All carried in the left hand a citron, and in the 
 right the lulab— a branch of palm woven round with willow and myrtle. 
 On each of the seven feast days the priests went out with music and the 
 choir of Levites, and the shouts of vast multitudes, to draw water in a 
 golden vessel, from the spring of Siloah ; to be poured out at the time of 
 the morning offering, as a libation, on the west side of the great altar, 
 amidst great joy, singing and dancing, such as was not all the year besides. 
 On the evening of the first day a grand illumination, from huge candela- 
 bra, which shed light far and near over the city, began in the Court of 
 the Women, and torch daiices of men were kept up, in the court, with 
 music and songs, till the Temple gates closed. 
 
 The Jewish authorities kept looking for Jesus, for they had counted on 
 His attending the great national holiday, and thus coming within their 
 reach ; but, to their disappointment, He appeared not to be in Jerusalem. 
 So, their officers reported. His absence had, indeed, been noted by the 
 multitude, and everywhere He was the subject of conversation and dis- 
 cussion. The Kabbis and higher Temple dignitaries had shown themselves 
 so hostile to Him that no one dared to mention His name, except in
 
 AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 533 
 
 whispers, for fear of excommunication ; but Ho was more or less the one 
 engrossing topic of the bazaars and the booths of the feast. Opinions 
 were divided. Some, Avho judged for themselves, maintained that He was 
 a good man, and that it would be well for all to follow what He taught ; 
 others, and they no doubt the great majority, who took their opinions 
 from their religious leaders, hotly and loudly denounced Him as unsafe 
 and dangerous, a breaker of the Sabbath, for had He not, on His last visit, 
 healed a blind man on the holy day ? 
 
 Meanwhile, when the feast was at its height, Jesus suddenly made His 
 appearance in the Temple porch, where the Ilabbis taught, and, calmly 
 taking His scat, began to teach the crovrd that soon gathered round Him. 
 It is not told us when He had arrived, or whether He lived for the week, 
 like the crowds, in a succah or booth of His own or of a friend ; or 
 whether He carried the lulab and citron, as others did, round the great 
 altar, or attended only to the graver matters of His New Kingdom. We 
 only know that He showed Himself openly in the city and in the Temple 
 courts, under the very eyes of His enemies. Loyalty to His woi-k had 
 demanded His delay in coming, for His life was still needed to proclaim 
 the New Kingdom in Jerusalem as well as in Galilee, if it were permitted 
 Him. He had lived mostly in the latter, but Jerusalem was the religious 
 centre of the nation, and all that happened, or was sjDoken publicly during 
 one of the great feasts, would be wafted, like seeds, to eveiy land. As a 
 Jew, moreover. He had a tender love for the City of David, the chosen 
 seat of Jehovah, His Heavenly Father — a spot dear then, as now, beyond 
 expression, to every Israelite. Before it was for ever too late. He would 
 fain bring its children to listen to the things of their peace, which He 
 alone could tell them. 
 
 The Jewish authorities were astounded, and hardly knew what course to 
 take. Some of them who approached, to listen to the fearless intruder, 
 were still more amazed at what they heard. They could now understand 
 how it had been said of Him, that He taught as one who had a commission 
 direct from God; and not like the Eabbis, who never spoke without 
 quoting an authority ; and how He had made so great a popular im^jression. 
 Art and study of effect had no place in His discourses, for the copiousness 
 and finish of a mere rhetorician were wanting. His resistless power lay 
 as much in Himself as in His words ; His calm dignity, and His look of 
 mingled purity and tenderness, confirming all He said, as by a holy 
 sanction. He did not merely treat of general religious and moral truths, 
 but spoke of quickening facts and realities. The advent of the Kingdom 
 of God, its nature and its glorious future, but above all, His own position 
 in it, as its Head and King, as He in whom the Father revealed Himself, 
 and in whom men were to find salvation, were the substance of His 
 addresses. They were, in fact, essentially a testimony resi)ccting Himself, 
 and a self-revelation. There were no sudden and violent bursts, no brilliant 
 flashes, but an atmosphere of more than earthly peace rested over both 
 speaker and words, from first to last. The most amazing claims were 
 uttered, not only without a trace of self-cousciousncss, but with the low- 
 liest humility. It seemed as if all He said was only what became Him.
 
 534 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 But with His humility, aud in addition to His transcendent dif^nity, the 
 fuhicss of His knowledge was no less remarkable. He was intimately 
 familiar with the sacred books, and even with the honoured extra-canonical 
 writings. He met and confuted opinions of the Eabbis by the subtlest 
 and most original references to Scripture ; Ho pierced beneath its letter to 
 the sj^irit ; He distinguished with the keenest acuteness between the Law, 
 as given by God, in its scope aud essence, and the Pharisaic traditions ; 
 and He clothed in the simplest language, the profoundest spiritual truths 
 of both the Law and the Prophets. Such a phenomenon was inexplicable. 
 
 The authorities, in amazement, could only ask themselves how He could 
 have such learning, when He had, never studied in the schools. Where 
 could He have got this power of handling the Scriptures like a great 
 Rabbi ? He was a Galila^an, and had never attended any teacher. Like 
 the old pi'opliets. He must have been " taught of God," and it was evident 
 that the people did not hesitate to recognise Him as one, though the 
 official classes were fain to decry Him, and knew the effect of a harsh and 
 contemptuous name. " How could a common man like this," said they, 
 " who has never been educated as a llabbi, possibly understand the Scrip- 
 tures P" Against their consciences, they tried to depreciate both Him and 
 Plis teaching. 
 
 Had they shown only curious or friendly wonder, Jesus would, perhaps, 
 have remained silent. But it was different when they were trying to 
 excite doubt and suspicion against Himself and His words, as it was clear 
 they were doing, from what He saw and heard. A deputation from the 
 chief priests having at last, by a direct interrogation, given Him an 
 opportunity of speech. He seized it at once. " Beyond doubt," said He, 
 to paraphrase His words slightly, " I have not learned in your schools 
 what I teach. But my doctrine is not a mere invention of my own; it is 
 not mine at all, but His who has sent me. I only repeat what He instructs 
 me to make known in His name. You speak as if religious truth were 
 a mere matter of tedious study. But it is to be learned by obedience, 
 rather than from books, as your own Wisdom of Sirach tells you, 'He that 
 keepeth the law of the Lord getteth the understanding thereof.' It needs 
 a heart willing to be taught of God, to comprehend it ; a heart at one 
 with Him, and eager to do His will, however contrary to one's own. He 
 whose soul has no love of truth, no oneness with God, cannot recognise 
 His ti'uth even when he hears it. If you had true love to Him and desired 
 to know His revealed w411, and to carry it out in your lives, you would 
 know from whom I have received the doctrine I teach, by its power to 
 purify and calm the heart, and by the hopes it gives for the world to come. 
 That I do not advance a doctrine of my own invention is, moreover, clear 
 from this, that if I did so I should seek my own honour and advantage. 
 But if I seek no honour for myself, but only for Him by whom I have 
 been sent, it shows that I am worthy of trust. To strive only for the 
 glory of God is in itself a proof of being His true mouthpiece and mes- 
 senger, and I leave you to say whether this does not apply to me. Have I 
 ever sought honour from men, and not rather the honour of my Father 
 alone ? Have I not alwaj^s professed to have received all from my Father p
 
 AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 535 
 
 I have liad no personal end, and it is, therefore, incredible that T sihould 
 be a deceiver, seeking to lead men astra}-." 
 
 The cavil of the Eabbis thns answered, Jesus forthwith took the offen- 
 sive. "You charge me," said He, "with not hnowinrj the Law; jou do 
 not l-ccp it. You boast of your zeal for it, and affect indignation for my 
 having, as you assert, broken it by healing a blind man on the Sabbath ; 
 an indignation so real that you would put me to death if you could. But 
 this, itself, is a violation of the Law, for the Law commands love to our 
 neighbour above even the Sabbath, and that slionld l)e my perfect defence." 
 He knew that the authorities had never forgiven Him His answer, at His 
 former visit, to their charge of having broken the Sabbath by the miracle 
 at the pool of Bethesda, and that they were plotting His death, even now, 
 on account of it. 
 
 Meanwhile, the crowd, perhaps knowing less than He of the secret 
 designs of the hierarchy, or affecting to deny them, believed, or feigned to 
 believe. Him in no danger, and broke out in angry repudiation of such a 
 charge. They had heard the Eabbis often ascribe His works to Beelzebub, 
 and fell back on their blasphemous slander as an explanation of His 
 language. He must have a devil. The Rabbis were right. He was crazed. 
 The evil spirit that spoke through Him was trying to stir them up against 
 their spiritual guides. 
 
 Without noticing the interruption, Jesus continued addressing the crowd 
 at large : " Your leaders are plotting to kill me for doing an act of mercy 
 on the Sabbath. But all of you are in a measure guilty, by your sympathy 
 with them : for you are offended with me at the miracle, on the same un- 
 righteous ground. But that you may see the injustice of your charge, let 
 me remind you of what often takes place in regard to circumcision. That 
 rite was commanded by Moses, though it dates from Abraham, and you 
 are so strict in performing it at the prescri))ed time, the eighth day, that 
 you circumcise a child even on the Sabbath, if necessary, that the law of 
 Moses in this particular be not broken. Do j'ou think the Sabljath was 
 first instituted at Sinai, and hence give the law of circumcision the pre- 
 ference as older ? Or, rather, have you not, of yourselves, decid^ed that in 
 some cases the law of the Sabbath must give way to other parts of the 
 Law? You accept the saying of the Rabbis, that ' circumcision drives 
 away the Sabbath.' But, if you perform circumcision, with all the work 
 it involves, on tlie Sabbath, without breaking the day, how can you be 
 angry at me, as if I had broken it by a work of mercy so macli more 
 beneficial as tlie making a blind man whole ? Never judge by appearance, 
 but look beneath the surface and judge righteously." 
 
 But now some joined the crowd who knew of the plots of the authorities 
 against His life, and could not understand how He should be allowed to 
 teach thus openly without interference. His words and demeanour had 
 softened their prejudice, and made it seem po3sil>le that tlie authorities 
 had become convinced, that He was, in reality, the Messiah, and sanctioned 
 this course. But the mere suggestion, in the shape of a question, was 
 enough to raise a hot dispute among theologians so keen. " Do not the 
 Rabbis tell us," said some, "' that the Messiah will Ije born at Bethlehem,
 
 530 THE LIFE OF CIIRIST, 
 
 but tliat He will be suatched away by sjjirits and tempests soon aftei' His 
 birtli, and that when Ho retui-ns tlic second time no one Avill know from 
 v/lience He lias come ? But we knoAV that this man comes from Nazarctli. 
 Our chief men, if they choose, may accept Him as the Messiah ; we will 
 not." 
 
 Jesus was still sitting in the Temple porch, teaching, but, on hearing 
 what was thus openly said in disparagement of His Messiahship, He broke 
 off His discourse, and called out to the noisy disputants in a louder voice 
 than He had liitherto used, — " You do certainly, in your own sense, know 
 who I am, and whence I come, but in a higher sense you know neither. I 
 come forward as the Messiah, not of myself ; I am sent by One whom you 
 cannot truly know, so long as you cling to your worldly ideas of the 
 Messiah — by One who, alone, has the right and power to send forth the 
 Messiah, and has exercised them in sending me. I know Him, though 
 you do not, for I have come forth from Him, and no other than He h?jS 
 sent me." 
 
 His hearers at once saw what was implied in this. It was no less than a 
 claim to have come forth from God, and was equivalent to asserting 
 Divine dignity, for He said nothing of being only an angel, or embodied 
 heavenly spirit, or prophet raised from the dead. He had once before, 
 after the very miracle for which He had been so assailed, justified Him- 
 self by saying, " My Fatlier worketh hitherto, and I work," and the words 
 had sounded so blasphemous, that the authorities had sought to kill Him, 
 because He had not only broken the Sabbath, but had said that God was 
 His Father, making Himself equal with God. The hostile part of the 
 crowd rightly saw a similar claim repeated now, and with the wild fana- 
 ticism of their race in that age, proposed to lay hold of Him, and hurry 
 Him outside the city on the instant, to stone Him, as the law against 
 blasphemy enjoined. But His hour had not yet come, and whether from 
 fear of the Galiloeans at the feast, or from other reasons, their rage died 
 away in words. 
 
 The fame of His miracles in the north had preceded Him to Jerusalem, 
 and being now further spread by the reports of the Galila^an pilgrims, 
 deepened the effect of His cure of the blind man at His last visit— the 
 very bitterness of His enemies having kept it from being forgotten. Num- 
 bers had thus been impressed in His favour, even before His appearance 
 at the feast, and not a few of these were so far won over Ijy the still 
 higher evidence of His wondrous words, and whole air and tone, that 
 many felt consti'ained to admit His claim to be the Messiah. Miracles 
 had always been held a characteristic of the Messiah's advent, and even 
 the bitterest enemies of Jesus did not deny His supernatural power. It 
 was evident that He was rapidly gaining ground, and the hierarchy knew 
 that if He rose they must fall. If they could arrest Him, while His ad- 
 herents had not as yet ventured on an open movement in His support, all 
 might be well. The Pharisees, therefore, and the Sadduccan chief priests 
 — mortal enemies at all other times — hastily issued a warrant to apprehend 
 Him, and sent some of the Temple police to cai-ry it out. 
 
 The sight of the well-known dress of these officials, on the outskirts of
 
 AT THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. 537 
 
 His audience, told the Avliole story to the quic'k inloUigencc of Jesus, aud 
 with that readiness which alwaj's marked llini, He forthwith began a 
 calm and clear anticii^ation of His death as near at hand. 
 
 " I shall be with you," said He, "only a short time longer, for I shall 
 soon return to my Father in HcaTen, who sent me. Then the days will 
 come Avhen sore distress will fall upon this city and land for rejectiiif me, 
 and you will seek help and deliverance from the Messiah, that is, from me, 
 but ye will not find me then. Persecuted and put to death now, ye will 
 then long for me in vain, when for ever gone from you, for where I shall 
 then be you cannot go, to fetch me from thence as your Saviour." 
 
 " What does He mean?" asked those around; " will He go to our Greek- 
 speaking brethren— the Hellenists in Egy2)t, or Asia Minor, or some other 
 of the lands of the Gentiles ? " 
 
 The day passed without any attempt to lay hold of Him, nor was He 
 disturbed again during the week. The last day of the Feast, known as 
 "ThcHosanna Rabba," and the "Great Day," found Him, as each day 
 before doubtless had done, in the Temple arcades. He had gone thither 
 early, to meet the crowds assembled for morning prayer. It was a day of 
 special rejoicing. A great procession of pilgrims marched seven times 
 round the city, with their lulabs, music and loud-voiced choirs preceding, 
 and the air was rent with shouts of Hosanna, in commemoration of the 
 taking of Jericho, the first city in the Holy Land that fell into the hands 
 of their fathers. Other multitudes streamed to the brook of Siloah, after 
 the priests and Levites, bearing the golden vessels, with which to draw 
 some of the water. As many as could get near the stream drank of it 
 amidst loud chanting of the words of Isaiah — " Ho, every one that thirsteth, 
 come ye to the waters," " With joy shall we draw water from the wells of 
 salvation" — which rose in jubilant harmony from the lijjs of all. The 
 water drawn by the priests, was, meanwhile, borne up to the Temple, 
 amidst boundless excitement. Such a crowd was, apparently, passing at 
 this moment. 
 
 Eising, as the crowds went by. His spirit was moved at such honest 
 enthusiasm, yet saddened at the moral decay which mistook a mere cere- 
 mony for religion. It was burning autumn weather, when the sun had for 
 months shone in a cloudless skj', and the early rains were longed for as 
 the monsoons in India after the summer heat. Water at all times is a 
 magic word in a sultry climate like Palestine, but at this moment it had a 
 double power. Standing, therefore, to give His words more solemnity. 
 His voice now sounded far and near over the throng, with soft clearness, 
 which arrested all : 
 
 " If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink, for I will give him the 
 living waters of God's heavenly grace, of which, as your Eabbis toll you, the 
 v»-ater you have now drawn from Siloah is only a type. He who believes in 
 me drinks into his soul from my fulness, as from a fountain, the riches of 
 Divine grace and truth. ISTor do they bring life to him alone who thus 
 drinks. They become in his OAvn heart, as the whole burden of Scripture 
 tells, a living spring, which shall flow forth from his lips and life in holy 
 words and deeds, quickening the thirsty around him." He meant, adds
 
 538 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 St. John, that this qiiickeiiing missionary zeal and power would first show 
 itself after the descent of the Holy Spirit, when He Himself liad entered 
 on His glory. Streams of holy influence, like rivers of living water, would 
 go forth from His Apostles through the Spirit's overflowing fulness in 
 their souls. 
 
 The whole discourse was now ended. The imjjressions it had left were 
 various. Many who had listened to it, whispered to their neighbours that 
 they were sure " This was the Prophet to come before the Messiah." 
 Others maintained He was the Messiah Himself ; but this opinion led to 
 hot dispute. " Does the Messiah, then, come out of Nazareth ? " asked 
 the incredulous Eabbinists. "Does not the Scripture say that the Christ 
 comes of the seed of David, and from Bethlehem, the village where David 
 was ? " But the division in the crowd was the safety of Jesus ; for those 
 who were fiercest to lay hands on Him as a blasphemer and Sabbath- 
 breaker, were afraid to do so, so strong did the party seem which sup- 
 ported Him. 
 
 The Temple police sent to arrest Him liad remained near, to the close, 
 to watch their opportunity. But the power and majesty of His discourse, 
 which had spell-bound so many others, had overawed and impressed even 
 them, so that they dared not touch Him, and went back to their masters 
 empty-handed. To the angry demand for an explanation, they could only 
 answer, " Never man spake as this man sjicaks." The Pharisees in the 
 Council, the special guardians of the public orthodoxy, professed them- 
 selves shocked at such dislo^'alty on the part of men entrusted with the 
 commission of the high ecclesiastical court. " How can you be so led 
 away ? Do you not see that only some of the ignorant rabble believe iu 
 Him ? Have any men of position, any members of the Council, or any 
 Rabbis, done so? They are qualified to judge on such matters; but as 
 for the common people, who have accepted such a transgressor as the 
 Messiah, it shows that they do not know the Law, and are therefore ac- 
 cursed of God." 
 
 One faint voice only was heard in the Council in hesitating defence of 
 Jesus. It was that of Nicodemus, His visitor by night on His first ap- 
 pearance. " I know, sirs, you are zealous for the Law, and rightly con- 
 demn those who are ignorant of it. But does the Law sanction our thus 
 condemning a man before it has heard Him, and found exactly what He 
 has done ? He had not moral courage to take a side, but could not with- 
 hold a timid word. Like all weak men, he found little favour for his 
 faint-hearted caution. "Are you, also, like Jesus, out of Galilee," they 
 asked, " that you believe in Him ? only ignorant Galilosans do so. Search 
 the Scri])tures, and you will see that no Galitean was ever inspired as a 
 prophet by God ; the race is despised of the Highest, and is it likely it 
 should give Jerusalem the Messiah P " 
 
 . In their blind rage they forgot that, at least, Jonah and Hosea and 
 Nahum were Galila?ans, and they ignored the fact that if the followers of 
 Jesus were mostly from the illiterate North, He had also not a few even 
 from the sons of bigoted Jerusalem.
 
 AFTER THE FEAST. 539 
 
 CHAPTER L. 
 
 AFTER. THE FEAST. 
 
 A LL who attcudecl the Feast o£ Tahei-naclcs were required to sleep in 
 -^^ the city the first night at least, biit were free afterwards to go any 
 distance outside, within the limit of a Sabbath day's journey. Jesus, 
 accustomed to the pure air of the hills and open country, and with little 
 sympathy for tlie noise and merriment, or for tlie crowds and confusion, of 
 the great holiday, was glad to avail Himself of this freedom, and went out, 
 each night, after leaving the Temple, to seek sleep in the house of some 
 friend on the Mount of Olives ; peidiaps to that of the family of Bethany, 
 of which wc hear so much soon after this. The early morning, however, 
 saw Ilim always at Ilis post in the Temple courts ; now in the royal porch, 
 now in the Court of the Women, through which the men passed to their 
 own. 
 
 The vast concourse of people from all countries, and the general excite- 
 ment and relaxation of the season, had gradually led to abuses. Pilgrim- 
 ages, in all ages, have had an indifferent name for their influence on 
 morals, and the yearly feasts at Jerusalem were probably no exception. 
 
 A large number of people had already gathered round Jesus, when a 
 commotion was seen in the Court of the Women, where He had sat down 
 to teach. A woman of the humbler class had been guilty of immorality, 
 and the scribes, on the moment, saw in her sin a possible snare for the 
 hated Galila\an. It was not their business, but that of her husband, to 
 accuse her ; nor could she Ije legally punished, except by divorce, if he, 
 himself, were not a man of pure life. It was the custom, however, in 
 cases of difficulty, to consult a famous Rabiji, and advantage was taken of 
 this, to entrap Jesus, if possible, by asking Him to adjudicate on the case. 
 If he condemned her, and insisted that she should be stoned to death, it 
 would injure Him in the eyes of the people, for the Law, in this particular, 
 had long been obsolete, from the very commonness of the offence. If, on 
 the other baud, he simply dismissed her, they could charge him with slight- 
 ing the Law, for it was still formally binding. To condemn her to death 
 would, moreover, bring Him under the Roman law, as an invasion of the 
 right of the governor. 
 
 Leading forAvard their trembling prisoner, unveiled, and exposed before 
 the crowd of men — the bitterest degradation to an Eastern woman — they 
 set her before Jesus, and asked with feigned humility : 
 
 " Teacher, this woman has been guilty of sin. Now Moses, in the Law, 
 charged us that such should be stoned. What is your opinion ? " 
 
 Knowing their smooth dissimulation. He instinctively felt that this 
 mock respect was a mere cloak for sinister designs. Yet the incident 
 threw Him into a moment's confusion. His soul shrank from the spectacle 
 thus brought before Him, and in His stainless purity He could not bear 
 to look on the fallen one. Stooping down, therefore, at once to hide the 
 blush He could not prevent, and to shoAV that He would have nothing to 
 do with such a matter, He began to write on the dust before Him — most
 
 540 THE LIFE OF CHIIIST. 
 
 likely fclie very words lie was presently to utter. Had tliey chosen to read 
 them, tliey niiglit have spared themselves the open exposure that followed- 
 But they were too occupied with their plot to read the warniii<^, and again 
 and again repeated the question, to force Him to answer. At last, raising 
 His face for a moment and looking straight at them, He said : 
 
 "Let him, among you, who is free from sin of a like kind, cast the first 
 stone at her, as is required of the chief witness, by Moses." 
 
 It was an age of deep immorality, and the words of Jesus went to their 
 consciences. He had again stooped and begun to write, as soon as He 
 had spoken, perhaps to remind them hoAV sin, when followed by penitence, 
 is effaced for ever, like characters written in dust. MeauAvhile, their own 
 bosoms became their judges. One after another, beginning at the oldest 
 among them, moved off, to the very last, and Jesus was left alone, with 
 the woman, in the midst of the crowd. 
 
 Eising once more, .and finding only the woman left. He asked her : 
 
 " Woman, where are thine accusers ? Did no one condemn thee, by cast- 
 ing a stone at thee ? " 
 
 " No one. Lord." 
 
 " Neither," said He, " shall I. I come not to condemn, but to save. I 
 am no criminal judge, either to sentence or acquit. Go, repent of thy 
 guilt, and sin no more." 
 
 His enemies had often murmured at the pity and favour He had shown 
 to the fallen and outcast. They knew how He had allowed one sinful 
 woman to wash His feet with her tears, and wipe them with her loose hair; 
 how He had eaten with publicans and sinners, and how He even had a pub- 
 lican among His disciples. They had hoped to use all this against Him, 
 but, once more, their schemes had only turned to their own shame. He 
 had given no opinion for the obsolete Law, or against it ; their own con- 
 sciences had set the offender free. 
 
 This incident past, He began His discourse again to those round Him. 
 He still sat in the Court of the Women, or, as it was sometimes called, 
 " the treasui-y," from the thirteen brazen chests for offerings, with their 
 trumpet-like mouths opening through the wall of its buildings. The court 
 was the great thoroughfare to that of the Israelites, which was reached 
 from it by the fifteen steps leading to the great gate. 
 
 In the addi-ess of the day before. He had spoken of Himself as alone 
 having the water of life for the thirst of the soul. " To give water to 
 drink," was a common phrase for teaching and explaining the Law, and 
 hence its meaning, when used by our Lord, was familiar to all His hearers. 
 Water, in such a climate, was the first necessary of life, and flowing or 
 living waters pictui'ed at once every image of joy and prosperity. But 
 the m.ighty light, filling the heavens, the first-born creation of Grod, lifts the 
 thoughts from individual benefit to that of the whole race, for light is the 
 condition and source of blessing, alike to nature and man. It was the 
 characteristic of Jesus to make everything round Him, in creation or com- 
 mon life. His tests and illustrations. The shouts of the multitude, as they 
 brought up the golden vessel of water from Siloam, had introduced the 
 discourse on the living waters. Hound the court in which He now sat,
 
 AFTER THE FEAST. 541 
 
 rose the gi-eat candelabra, iu wlioso huge cups were kindled the ilh;miua- 
 tions of the feasts that banished night from the city, and in whose Ijright- 
 ness the multitudes found darkness changed to day, and these He now 
 used as a text. 
 
 Pointing to them, and from them to the glorious sun, just risen over the 
 Mount of Olives, and shining with dazzling splendour on the white houses 
 of the city and the marble and gold of the Temple walls and gates, He 
 began a new discourse, in language, which, from the lips of a Jew, was a 
 direct claim to be the Messiah. 
 
 " I am the Light of the World," said He ; " that is, of the whole race 
 of man! " Such words from One who was humility itself— One acknow- 
 ledged by all to have unbounded supernatural power at His commaiid, yet 
 so self-restrained that He never used it for His own advantage, and so 
 unassuming and lowly that even the weakest and poorest felt perfectly 
 free to approach Him — were uttered with a calm dignity which vouched 
 their truth. " In me dwells Divine trvith," He continued, " and from me 
 it shines forth, like the light, to all mankind. He who becomes my true 
 disciple, and follows me sincerely, will no longer walk in the dai-kness of 
 ignorance and sin, which is the death of the soul, but in the light of ever- 
 lasting life, given to the children of the Messiah's kingdom." 
 
 Some adherents of the Eabbinical party, who remained to watch Him, 
 listened with eager attention to every word. Enraged at the failure of the 
 last attempt to entrap Him, the llauguage they had now heard, which was 
 far beyond what any prophet had ever claimed for himself, deepened their 
 bitterness. 
 
 "You make yourself judge in your own favour," said they. "You 
 require us to believe you, on your own word. It is too much to ask. A 
 man's witness on his own behalf is worthless." 
 
 " I do not make myself witness in my own favour," replied Jesus. " Your 
 rule does not apply to me, for I speak not for myself alone, but as the 
 mouthpiece of Him from whom I came, and to whom I shall soon return. 
 If you knew who He was, you would be forced to receive His testimony to 
 me. But you do not know Him, and therefore you reject it, for you know 
 neither whence I came nor whither I shall return. I know, and must know, 
 best, whose messenger I am, and what commission He has given me. You 
 have no right to accuse me as a deceiver, for you are not in a position to 
 judge of me, since you know nothing of my mission. You look at me with 
 jaundiced eyes, and judge only by my lowly outward appearance, and are 
 thus misled. I, by myself, judge neither in my own favour, nor against 
 any one, for I have come not to condemn, but to save. If, indeed, in any 
 case I seem to judge, as iu this instance resi^ecting my commission, it is 
 not I, alone, who do so, but I and my Father who has sent me judge to- 
 gether, and thus the judgment must be true. I am not alone ; the Father 
 who sent me is with me, and thus, even by your own Law, by whicli the 
 testimony of two men is received as true, that which I offer for myself is 
 more than sufficient, for I offer you my own word, and no one can convict 
 me of untruthfulness, and also the witness of my Father. He witnesses for 
 me by the very truths I utter, and by the miracles you admit I perform."
 
 642 THE LIFE OF CIIllIST. 
 
 " Where is, then, this second witness, Thy Father? " retorted His ads'cr- 
 saries. " We do not see Him. He must bo here, if, as you say, He is a 
 witness for you ? " He had too often spoken of God as His Father to per- 
 mit of any mistake as to His meaning, but they affected to misunderstand 
 Him. With perfect calmness, Jesus replied, " You ask who is my Father, 
 and do not know me, myself. I cannot answer you till you have juster 
 conceptions of me. If you looked at me, my teaching, and my deeds, ir> 
 a right light, you would know who my Father is, for He reveals Himself 
 in me. But your hearts are now so prejudiced, that you would not 
 understand what I might tell you, either of myself or of Him, were I to 
 attempt it." 
 
 These were bold words in such a place, the very stronghold of His 
 enemies ; but as He finished and rose to depart, no one laid hands on 
 Him. His hour was not yet come. 
 
 A fragment of another discourse delivered like this in the Temple, on 
 one of the following days, has been preserved. The immediate circum- 
 stances preceding are not recorded, but there must have been another 
 dispute with His opponents. A fresh attempt to win them, followed ; with 
 solemn warnings of the results of their finally rejecting Him. 
 
 " The time approaches," said He, in effect, " when I shall leave you, and 
 when I am gone you will seek me, that is, you will cry out for the Messiah, 
 but in vain, and will look for Him without success ; you will fain be de- 
 livered from the calamities that will come on you; but you will die, unjoar- 
 doned and unsanctified, with your sins on your souls — die here, and die for 
 ever ; for your seeking me, that is, the Messiah, will not be from faith and 
 repentance, but only a despairing cry for deliverance fi'om temporal dis- 
 tress. You cannot hope to be able to go up to heaven, to find and bring 
 me down as your Saviour. I shall be gone from you for ever." 
 
 " Will He kill Himself ? " asked one of the l:>itterest among the by- 
 standers, with blasphemous irony. " In that case, certainly, we shall not 
 be either able or willing to follow Him, to where He will go ! " 
 
 Taking no notice of the coarse insulting jest, Jesus went on to point 
 \ out, calmly, and with surpassing dignity, that they spake as they did only 
 becavise they could not comprehend Him or His sayings, coming as He did 
 from above. " You spring from the earth, I from heaven ; your natures 
 and hearts, in keeping with your origin, are without the higher wisdom 
 and Divine life of those who are born of God. You have the thoughts 
 and ideas of this age ; I speak those of the New Kingdom of God. It was 
 on this ground I said to you, that you would die in your sins, for only faith 
 in me as the Messiah, can raise those who are not born from above— gross 
 fleshly souls, born only of the flesh— to higher Divine life, in time and 
 eternity. If you do not believe that I am He, you shall certainly die in 
 your sins." 
 
 " I am He," was the sum of Jehovah's self-proclamation in the Old 
 Testament, and it was now repeated, in its lofty majesty, by Jesus, of His 
 Dwn Messianic dignity. He could assume that the question of the Messiah, 
 was the ever-present and supreme thought of all His hearers. The one 
 point was whether He, or another yet to come, were the expected One.
 
 AFTER THE FEAST. 543 
 
 The Rabbinists perfectly understood Him, but would not acknowledge 
 that they did so, and asked Him contemptuously, " Who art Thou, then ? " 
 
 " I am what I have said from the beginning of my ministry I was —how 
 can you still ask ? I have much to say respecting you, much especially 
 to blame ; but I refrain, and confine myself to my immediate mission — 
 to jiroclaini to mankind what I have received from Him who sent me." 
 Strange as it might seem, though He had used similar terms so often 
 that the allusion to God was generally recognised at once. His hearers 
 did not in this instance understand Him. 
 
 Seeing their hesitation. He went on : " Had you acknowledged me as 
 the Messiah, you would have understood what I have said of my Father. 
 B at when you have crucified me, you will know that I am He, and that I 
 never act alone, but speak only what I have heard from my Father before 
 I came into the world. My glory, which will be revealed after I die, will 
 force. you to realize this." He referred to the future descent of the Holy 
 Spirit after His resurrection, the miracles of the Apostles, the spread of 
 His Kingdom, the judgment of God on the nation, and His final return iu 
 the clouds of heaven at the last day. "My Father w'ho sent me," He con- 
 tinued, " has not left me alone, though you do not see Him, but have befoi'e 
 you only a lowly man, in the midst of enemies ; He is ever with me, for I 
 do always the things that ])lease Him." 
 
 These lofty words must have been wondrously borne out by His whole 
 air, and by the calm truth and heavenliness of His tone and looks ; for, 
 instead of repelling His hearers by the contradiction between claims so 
 awful, and Him who made them, which we instinctively feel there must 
 have been had they been uttered by sinful men like ourselves, they won 
 many to believe in Him, there and then, as the Messiah. 
 
 It is impossible not to feel that such words were a distinct claim of 
 absolute sinlessuess, on which no mere man could for a moment venture. 
 Yet in His mouth they seemed only the fitting expression of evident ti'uth. 
 Nor is it possible to exaggerate their importance. When we remember 
 how entirely His whole life was devoted to the enforcement of the purest 
 morals, even in the dom^ain of thought and conscience they acquire a sig- 
 nificance that awes the mind. Such an absolute purity implied the keenest 
 discrimination between good and evil, holiness and sin. " To please God," 
 was with Him no empty phrase, but imj^lied a Divine holiness in the very 
 fountains of being ; pure as the light of a morning without clouds. Yet 
 His language respecting Himself was always the same. The greatest 
 saints are most ready to bewail their unworthiness ; but He never for a 
 moment humbles Himself before God for sin ; never asks pardon for it ; 
 and not only makes no aijproach to expressing a sense of needing repent- 
 ance and forgiveness, but calmly takes on Himself the Divine prerogative 
 of forgiving the sins of men. The Ideal of humility and truth and holy 
 life. He must have known His own spiritual state Avith exact fidelity, for 
 the passing of even an unworthy thought over such a soul, Avould have 
 instantly clouded its peace and joy. Yet, with this perfect self-knowledge, 
 He covdd calmly claim tliat His Father saw in Him only His own imago 
 of perfect holiness, which alone can please Him.
 
 544 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 The overpowering impression produced on His hearers, was, however, 
 too sudden and superficial for permanence. 
 
 Resuming His discourse, therefore. He went on addressing those who, 
 for the moment, in sjoite of themselves, believed on Him—" If your present 
 professions be deep and lasting, and you continue permanently in the same 
 mind, acknowledging me as the Messiah, and carrying out my teaching in 
 your hearts and lives, you will be my disciples indeed. You will then, by 
 experience, know the power and worth of the Divine truths of my Person 
 and teaching, for my words are the truth, and the truth will make you 
 free." 
 
 He spoke, of course, of spiritual freedom ; of emanciiDation from a sinful 
 life by the elevating and purifying influence of their new faith ; but, like 
 Nicodemus with the new birth, or the Samaritan woman with the living 
 water, or the Twelve with the leaven of the Pharisees, they understood the 
 word only of political liberty, and in a moment showed how little they 
 comprehended their new Master's spirit. Their fierce Jewish pride was 
 instantly in a blaze. 
 
 " Free ! what do you mean ? " said they. " We are the descendants of 
 Abraham ; the race to whom God gave the promise of being the first of 
 nations, His chosen people. We have never been in bondage to anj. 
 What do you mean ? " They conveniently forgot the episodes of Egypt 
 and Babylon, and thought of the shadow of political liberty they enjoyed 
 under the prudent Eomans, by the retention of their own laws, as in the 
 protected States of India under Britain. It was an offence punishable 
 with excommunication for one Jew to call another a slave, and part of 
 their morning prayer, even when under a foreign yoke, ran thus — " Blessed 
 be the Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has made me a free 
 man." 
 
 But Jesus answered, " With all earnestness, let me tell you that every 
 one who commits sin is under the power of sin — a slave under that of his 
 master. I speak of spiritual liberty, not of political. You have need of 
 the help I can and will give you, if you desire to free j^ourself from this 
 moral slavery — the bondage to your own sinful inclinations and habits 
 You are slaves in the great household of God, not sons, and the slave has 
 no claim to remain always in the household ; it is in the power of his lord 
 to sell him to another, or to put him out, when he pleases. All men, 
 whether Jews or others, are sinners, and as such, slaves of their sin, and 
 must be made free, before they can claim, as you do, to belong of right to 
 the household of God. Ho will not treat the slaves of sin as His sons, but 
 will turn them out of His kingdom as a lord drives out an unworthy slave. 
 But I, the Son of God, abide in God's household, as His Son, for ever, and 
 hence if by the truth I proclaim, and the grace I secvire you, I free you 
 from slavery to sin, you will be really free; not outwardly only, and in 
 name, as now. Were I not to be always, as His Son, in the Household of 
 God, my Father, you might doubt my power, or fear because of my absence ; 
 but my presence there for ever gives you perfect security that the freedom 
 I offer will be real and abiding. I know that you are descended from 
 Abraham, but it is only in a bodily sense. If you were his spiritual sons,
 
 AFTEE THE FEAST. 545 
 
 you would believe in me ; but, now, in spite of your passing belief, I see 
 that you have turned against me already, and gone back to those who 
 would kill me. Need I say that j'ou act thus only because my teaching 
 had no real hold on your hearts ? I have told you what I have seen when 
 I was still with my Father ; but you act according to the teaching of youY 
 father." 
 
 " Our father," interrupted some, " is Abraham," — for they saw that He 
 meant something else. " If ye were in the true sense," replied Jesus, " not 
 in mere outward descent, the sons of Abraham, you would imitate Abraham ; 
 to do so is the only descent from him of worth before God. But you seek 
 to kill me, a man who has s])oken to j'ou the truth, which I have received 
 from God, for your good, because it humbles your pride and self-righteous- 
 ness. Abraham would never have acted thus. He received and rejoiced 
 in the truth as revealed to him, though it was far less clear than my words 
 have made it to you. The fact is, I repeat, with unutterable sadness, you 
 act as your father teaches you." 
 
 " \\liat do you mean ? " cried out a number at once. " You say that 
 Abraham is not our father ; who is our father, then ? Do you mean that 
 Sarah, our mother, was unfaithful to Abraham, and that he was only our 
 father in name, not in fact ? AVe have only one father, iiot tioo, as they 
 who are born from adultery, and if j-ou deny it is Ahraham, it must be God." 
 
 " If God were your father, you would love ME," quietly replied Jesus, 
 " for I am the Very Son of God, proceeding, in my Being, from Him, and 
 descending from heaven to mankind. I have not come from any personal 
 and private act of my own, but as the Messiah sent forth by the Father. 
 You cannot understand what I say, because your hearts are so gross that 
 you have no ears for my teaching; it is dark to you because you are 
 morally blind. So far from being the spiritual children of Abraham, far 
 less of God, you are children of the devil ; and, true to your nature, ye 
 copy your father. From the beginning of the human race he was a mur- 
 derer, and put away the truth from him, because there is no truth in him. 
 The devil is a liar by nature, and lives in lies, and knows nothing of truth, 
 and his children are liars like their father— that is, they thrust away the 
 truth from them, as you are doing now. 
 
 " Because I speak the truth, and do not seek, like Satan, to win you to 
 evil, by flattering your self-deception and sins, you do not believe me. 
 Yet would I deceive you ? Who of you can convict me of sin ? But if I 
 l)e sinless, I can have no untruthfulness, no lie, in me, and, therefore, what 
 I speak must be truth and truth only. Hence I am right in saying yoy 
 cannot be the children of God, for he that is of God hears God's words, 
 that is, hears me, for I speak the words of God. That you are not really 
 the children of God, though you call yourselves such, explains why you do 
 not believe in me." 
 
 "That proves what we said of you," interrupted some of the crowd. 
 " Such language about your own nation shows that we wei'e right in 
 saying that you were a Samaritan, an enemy of the true people of God, 
 and possessed with a devil." 
 
 " I have not a devil," rejilied Jesus ; " I honour my Father by these very 
 
 N N
 
 546 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 words, for they tend to the glory of God. As He has taught me, so I 
 teach you, when I say that the wicked are servants and children of the 
 devil. Yet, though I speak not from my own authority, but that of God, 
 you do me, His messenger, the great dishonour of saying I have a devil. 
 But I shall not attempt to refute the slander, for I care nothing for either 
 your approval or praise. There is one here— my Father — who cares for 
 my honour, and will judge those who condemn me. Would that none of 
 you expose yourselves to His wrath ! May you rather receive from Him 
 life eternal ! Once more, let me repeat, He that believes in me, and obeys 
 my words, shall never taste death." 
 
 As usual, the hearers put a material sense on those words, and under- 
 stood them of natural death ; taking it as a proof of their assertion as to 
 His having a devil, that He could promise any one that He should never 
 die. " Even Abraham died," said they, " and so did the prophets. "Whom 
 do you make yourself ? You put yourself above all men, even the greatest. 
 Abraham could not ward ofE death, nor could the pro25hets. Do you claim 
 to be greater than they ? " 
 
 "Were I, for mere desire of glory," replied Jesus, "to boast of being 
 greater than Abraham, such glory would be idle. If what I have said 
 tend to exalt me, it is not I who honour myself, but my Father, by whose 
 authority I act and speak, that honours me — my Father, of whom you say 
 He is 3^our God. If you fail to see that He constantly does so, it is because, 
 in sijitc of your calling yourselves His jieople, you have not known Him. 
 But I know Him, as only His Son can. If I were to say that I did not 
 know Him, and speak His words, I should be, like yourselves, untruthful ; 
 but I both know Him, and keep all His commands, for my whole life is 
 obedience to Him. 
 
 " But that you,may know that I really am greater than even Abraham, 
 the Friend of God ; let me tell you that Abraham, when he received, with 
 such joy, the promise that the Messiah should come from his race, and 
 bless all nations, was rejoicing that he would, hereafter, from Heaven, 
 see my day, and he has seen my appearing, from his abode in Paradise, 
 and exulted at it." 
 
 The crowd, gross as usual, understood these words to refer to Abraham's 
 earthly life, and fancied that Jesus was now claiming to have been alive 
 so long ago as the time of Abraham, and to have known him. 
 
 " It is two thousand years ago since Abraham's day," broke in a voice, 
 " and you are not fifty years old yet ; do you mean to say you have seen 
 Abraham P " 
 
 " I mean to say," replied Jesus, " far more than even that. Let me tell 
 you, with the utmost solemnity, before Abraham was born, I Am." 
 
 This was the very phrase in which Jehovah had announced Himself to 
 Israel in Egypt. It implied a continuous existence from the beginning, 
 as if the speaker. Himself, claimed to be the Uncreated Eternal. Abraham 
 had come into being, but He had independent existence, without a be- 
 ginning. 
 
 His hearers instantly took it in this august 'meaning, and Jesus, the 
 Truth, made no attempt, then or afterwards, to undeceive them. Utterly
 
 THE LAST MONTH OF THE YEAR. 547 
 
 turned against Him, they rushed hither and thither, iu wild fanaticism, 
 for stones, with which to put Him to death as a bh^sphemer. Many of 
 those used in the building of parts of the Temple, still incomplete, lay in 
 piles at different spots. But Jesus hid Himself among the crowd, some 
 of whom were less hostile, and, in the confusion, passed safely out of the 
 sacred precincts. 
 
 CHAPTER LI. 
 
 THE lAST MONTH OF THE YEAU. 
 
 "pEUDENCE demanded that Jesus should for a time withdraw from 
 -*- Jerusalem, after the outbreak of murderous fanaticism in the Temple 
 courts, and He would be the more inclined to this because Judea had, as 
 yet, enjoyed so small a share of His ministry. The unmeasured religious 
 pride, which had resisted any impression in His first lengthened visit 
 might possibly yield, in some cases, after the incidents of His work iu 
 Galilee and Jerusalem, and doubtless did so; perhaps iu more instances 
 than we suspect. But whatever the success. He could not leave the 
 special home-land of Israel without one more attempt to win it to the New 
 Kingdom of God. Hence the next months, till after the Ecast of Dedication 
 in December, were spent either in Jerusalem or Judea. 
 
 In these last weeks of His life Jesus found a home, from time to time, 
 in the bosom of a village family in Bethany, on the east side of the Mount 
 of Olives. When He first came to know them is not told ; perhaps they 
 were among the few fruits of his former sojourn in Judea; possibly the 
 family of him who is known in the Gospels as Simon the Leper ; whom 
 Christ had cured during His early Judean labours, and thus won to the 
 Faith. Bethany is easily reached from Jerusalem. The flight of steps on 
 the east side of the Temple, before the Golden Gate, led to the quiet valley 
 of the Kedron. A bridge over the sometimes dry channel of the stream 
 opened into a camel path, rising, past Gethsemane, in a slow and gentle 
 ascent, over the brow of the hill which lies between the Mount of Olives 
 and that which Pompey had defiled by his camp, — called, from this, the 
 Hill of Offence. To save distance, however, a footway ran from Geth- 
 semane over the top of Olivet, and this, travellers like Jesus for the most 
 part preferred to the other, easier, but more circuitous road. Descending 
 the eastern slope, a few steps led from the bare hill-side, with its scattered, 
 prickly shrubs, to a sweet hollow, rich in fig, almond, and olive trees, 
 through which wound a road, here and there cut out in the side of the 
 hill. Ascending the east end of this dell, Bethany lay close in sight, only 
 three-quarters of an hour's distance from Jerusalem, but hidden from it 
 by a spur of the Mount of Olives. The ruins of a tower rise, now, over 
 the highest point of the village, but they are of later date than the days 
 of our Lord. The houses, whitewashed and flat-roofed, lie hidden among 
 the surrounding heights, amidst green fields and trees of many kinds ; all 
 the more charming, as the eastern side of Mount Olivet, the background 
 to the picture, is much more barren and dreary than the wcsteri;.
 
 648 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 In this sequestered spot, on the edge of the great wilderness of Judea, 
 Jesus found a delightful retreat in the vine-covered cottage of Martha 
 and Mary and their brother Lazarus. Loving and beloved, it always 
 offered a jieaceful retirement fi'om the confusion and danger of the Temple 
 courts, or the still more exhausting circuits of His wider southern journeys. 
 It was the one spot, so far as we know, that He could call home in these 
 last months, but it was apparently the sweetest and best loved, He had 
 ever had. 
 
 The household consisted of two sisters and a brother — Martha, Mary, 
 and Lazarus — names which mark the transition character of the times ; 
 for, while " Martha " was the iincbanged native equivalent of " lady," 
 "Mary" and "Lazarus " were Greek forms of the old Hebrew " Miriam" 
 and " Eleazer." May we ti-ace, in this superiority to narrow conservatism, 
 a liberality in their joarents, which led both them and their children to 
 receive the Galitean teacher so readily and so fondly ? They had evidently 
 been disciples before this last stay in Judea; probably from the time of 
 their now dead father, who must often have talked over with them his 
 reasons for loving tinist in Christ. 
 
 Martha appears to have been the head of the little household, and may 
 have been, as many have believed, a widow. The family seems to have 
 had a good social position, and to have been above the average in circum- 
 stances. The character of the two sisters shows itself vividly in the first 
 notice. Martha shares the piety of her sister, but fails, at first, to rise to 
 such a high conception of the nature and dignity of their wondrous Friend 
 as Mary, and is busied with the practical cares of life to an extent that 
 seems to Him excessive. Amiably anxious for the comfort of her guest, 
 she is absorbed in every detail of hospitality which she thinks likely to 
 please Him, while Mary sits at His feet, to listen to His words and watch 
 His every look. The busy, motherly Martha, seeing her sister thus 
 seemingly idle, feels a passing jealousy and annoyance, unworthy of her 
 calmer self — for a word or a look would doubtless have been enough — and 
 comes impatiently to Jesus with a complaint, not free from irreverence. 
 " Lord," says she, " do you not care that my sister has left me to do all 
 the work alone? If you speak to her, she w^ill help me." As if to imply 
 that she would pay no attention to Martha's words. 
 
 The gentle calmness of Jesus, too grateful to both for their loving ten- 
 derness to overlook the good in either, made only the tenderest rejaly. 
 " Martha, Martha," said He, " my wants are easily satisfied, and it is, be- 
 sides, better, like Mary, to choose the one thing needful above all — sujireme 
 concern for the things of God — for it alone can never be taken from us." 
 Of Lazarus, before his death, we oidy know that his spirit and temper 
 were such that Jesus made him, in an especial manner. His friend. 
 
 An incident of this period is preserved by St. Luke. In one of our 
 Lord's journeys in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, a Rabbi, skilled in 
 the Mosiac Law, and, as such, a public teacher and interpreter of the 
 Rabbinical rules, rising from his seat among his students, as Jesus passed, 
 resolved to show his wisdom at the expense of the hated Galitean, and 
 trap Him, if possible, into some doubtful utterance. "Teacher," asked he,
 
 THE LAST MONTH OF THE YEAE. 549 
 
 " what shall I do to inherit eternal life ? We know what the Eabbis enjoin, 
 but what sayest Thou ? " 
 
 " AVhat is written in the Law ? " replied Jesus, " howreadest thou ? For 
 the law of God alone can determine such a matter." 
 
 Quoting a passage which every Jew repeated in each morning and even- 
 ing's prayer, and wore in the little text-boxes of his phylactery, he answered 
 glibly, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all 
 thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind," and added, in 
 a Jewish sense, " and thy neighbour as thyself." 
 
 " You ai'c quite right," said Jesus ; " do this, and you shall live." 
 
 The answer hardly left room for anything further ; but the questioner 
 would not be balked of an ojiportunity of showing his acuteness, and, per- 
 haps, of drawing Jesus into a difRcultj^. No command was so plain as 
 not to furnish subjects for dispute to hair-splitting theologians of his 
 class ; and, in this case, there had been endless wrangling in the Eabbini- 
 cal schools on the definition of the word " neighbour." Jcsvis, moreover, 
 as was well known, held very broad views on the subject ; views utterly 
 heterodox in the eyes of the schools. Determined not to let conversation 
 drop, the questioner, therefore, opened it afresh. 
 
 " But you have not told me," said he, " who is my neighbour. Pray do 
 so, else I may fail in my duty." 
 
 Instead of answering him directly, Jesus rei^lied, in the fashion of the 
 Eabbis themselves, by a parable, which I amplify for its clearer under- 
 standing. 
 
 "A certain man," said He, "went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. 
 You know the way, so steep, wild, and dangerous: well called the Bloody 
 Eoad, for who can tell how many robberies and murders have happened on 
 it in these unsettled times, when the country is full of men driven from 
 their homes by oppression and misery ? As he went on, a band of robbers 
 from, the wild gorges through which the road sinks, rushed out ujion him ; 
 stripped him, for he was a poor man, with only his clothes to take from 
 him ; beat him when he resisted, and then made off, leaving him half dead. 
 
 " As he lay bleeding, insensible, and naked on the rough stones, a ^Driest, 
 who, like so many more, lived at Jericho, and had finished his course at 
 the Temple, went past. He was busy reading the copy of the Law, which 
 all priests carry with them ; but as he came near and saw the wounded 
 and seemingly dying man, he hastily crossed over and passed on the other 
 side of the road, afraid of defiling himself by blood, or by the touch of one 
 perhaps unclean, 
 
 " Soon after, a Levite, also from the Temple, came by, and he, when he 
 saw the injured man, stepped over to him, and stood for a time looking at 
 him, but presently crossed the road again, as if he had been polluted, and 
 went on in all haste, lest the like should happen to himself. 
 
 " But a Samaritan, travelling that way, came where the poor man lay, 
 and, when he saw him, was moved with comjiassion at his misery ; and 
 went to him, and, lighting from his ass, bound up his wounds, after pour- 
 ing oil mixed with wine on them, to assuage the pain and soften the in- 
 jured parts ; and set him on his own beast, never thinking whom he might
 
 650 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 be liclping — Avlietlier Jgay, heathen, or fellow-countryman, or of his own 
 clanger in such a spot ; and brought him to the khan, which, you know, 
 stands at the road-side, amidst the bare walls of rocks, thi'ce hours from 
 Jerusalem. There he had every care taken of him, and stayed with him, 
 tending him through the night. His own business forced him to leave 
 next day ; but before doing so, he went to the keeper of the khan, and 
 gave him two denarii, telling him to take care of him, and adding, that if 
 more were needed, he would give it when he came back. 
 
 " Which of these three, do you think, was neighbour to him that fell 
 among the robbers ? " 
 
 The Rabbi, true to his national hatred, would not utter tlie abhorred 
 word, " the Samaritan." " He that had mercy on him, no doubt," said he. 
 
 " Go and do thou in like manner," replied Jesus, and left him, it may be 
 humbled and mortified, but it is to be hoped, a wiser and better man. 
 
 A fragment of the familiar instructions of these months, by which 
 Jesus daily trained His disciples, is preserved to us by St. Luke. At an 
 earlier ])eriod. He had given the Twelve and His other hearers a model of 
 prayer, in the Sermon on the Mount, but now, one, perhaps of the later 
 disciples, asked for such a form as other Eabbis, and as John, taught their 
 followers. With the gentle repetition we so often find in the Gospels, 
 Jesus, forthwith, once more recited the model He had already prescribed, 
 and took advantage of the request, to enforce the value of prayer by simi- 
 lar assurances of answer from God as He had given before. In one detail, 
 however. He varied His language, by adding a brief and pointed parable. 
 
 "You know," said He, " how it is with men. If any of you have a friend, 
 and having gone to him in the middle of the night, call through the door, 
 ' Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has just come to my 
 house from a journey ; the weather was so hot, he could not start till the 
 cool of the day, and this has made him late, and I have nothing to set 
 before him ; ' most likely he whom you thus disturb will say to you from 
 within, ' Trouble me not ; the door is locked for the night, and my child- 
 ren arc with me in bed, and I cannot wake them. I cannot get nj) and give 
 you what you ask.' Yet, if you refuse to leave, and keep renewing your 
 request, he will, in the end, rise and give you as many loaves as you need, 
 yielding to your importunity, what he would not do for you as his friend. 
 
 " If, now, selfish men listen to those who thus will not take a denial, how 
 much more surely will the God of love listen to humble and persistent 
 prayer ? Be sure, therefore, that they who, with earnest, believing souls, 
 seek the supply of spiritual wants for themselves or others, will assuredly 
 have their petitions heard." 
 
 While He was still in Jerusalem and its neighbourhood, the Seventy, 
 having fulfilled their mission, made their way back to Him. Like the 
 Twelve, they returned in greatjoy at the ir success, and reported that even 
 the devils had been subject to them, through their Master's name, though 
 they had received no such special power over them as He had given to the 
 Twelve. It was a moment of calm triumph to Jesus, as the sure anticipa- 
 tion of infinitely greater results hereafter. His spirit caught the conta- 
 gion of their gladness, and gloom and despondency were forgotten in tho
 
 THE LAST MONTH OF THE YEAE. 551 
 
 vision of the future triumph of the New Kiugdom — His one all-absorbing 
 thought. But there was a danger lest their very success might injure 
 them. The consideration they had won by it might tend to unworthy 
 pride. It was needful to warn them, and moderate their self-confidence. 
 
 "You need not wonder," said He, "that Satan is not able to withstand 
 you. Long ere now, I foresaw, in spirit, that he would fall like a light- 
 ning-flash from the height of his power, at my coming, and the putting 
 forth of my might. He has fallen, now, to the earth, where his craft and 
 designs can be seen and met. His sway is already broken by the new- 
 begun Kingdom of God. It has struck him down, as it were, from the 
 sky, with its secrecy and sudden surprises ; and he is, now, as if seen and 
 easy to shun. I have broken his sceptre, and made it possible for you to 
 do what you have done. Take heed, therefore, not to think too much of 
 yourselves, as if the success were your own. I now give you far greater 
 power than any you have yet enjoyed. You will, hereafter, tread all 
 Satanic powers—the" serpents and scorpions of hell — under your feet, as 
 victors tread under foot their conquered foes, and nothing will be suffered 
 to hinder your triumph as my servants. You need not, therefore, fear 
 Satan. 
 
 " Yet success over the enemy of souls is not that in which you should 
 rejoice most. It may raise pride, and make you too secure. Rather 
 rejoice that your names, as my disciples, are in the roll of citizens of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. It is an infinitely greater honour than any outward 
 respect these wonders could bring j'ou." 
 
 The murderous outburst from which Jesus had fled, was now a thing of 
 the past, so that He could once more venture into Jerusalem, and even 
 into the Temple. The spacious porches were a favourite haunt of the 
 afilicted poor, and among those, of a man blind from his birth. Surrounded 
 and followed, as usual, by a number of disciples, Jesus was, one day, 
 passing, when this man attracted His notice. It is not said that He spoke 
 to him ; but the mere fact of His paying any heed to him, suggested a 
 question to some of those around. " Rabbi," they asked, " we have been 
 taught that children are born lame, crooked, maimed, blind, or otherwise 
 defective, for some sin of their parents, or for some sin committed by 
 themselves before lurth. Who sinned, in this case ; this man, or his parents, 
 that he was born blind ?" 
 
 That there was a strict system of rewards and punishments during the 
 present life, according to the merits or sins of individuals, had been the 
 original doctrine of Jewish theology. It had gradually, hoAvever, been 
 modified, though still held by the multitude ; and it was sujierseded in the 
 New Kingdom by the transfer of final retribution to the future world. 
 The Rabbinical theology, sedulously taught iin every synagogue, sought 
 to reconcile the contradiction between the hereditary belief and the facts 
 of life, by laboured and unsatisfactory theories. The words were put into 
 the mouth of God Himself, in one of the current apologues so much in 
 vogue, that " the good man, if prosperous, was so as the son of a righteous 
 man ; while the unfortunate good man suffered as the son of a sinful 
 parent. So, also, the vficked man might be prosperous, if the son of a
 
 552 THE LIFE OF CHRIST, 
 
 godly parent; but if unfortunate, it sliowcd that his parents had l)ct'U 
 sinners." It Avas further believed that a child might sin before its birth, 
 though it is a question whether there was any general idea of the trans- 
 migration of souls, to account for suffering as the punishment of sin in 
 some earlier existence. 
 
 " The affliction of this man," replied Jesus, " has been caused neither by 
 his own sin, nor by that of his parents ; but his being born blind offers 
 an op2iorfcunity for the display of the Divine power and goodness in his 
 person. It is on such sufferers as he that I must show the mighty works 
 Avhich God has given me to do as the Messiah. In His service I must 
 labour imweariedly, for God, my Father, never ceases to do good. Like 
 Him with His work, I cannot intermit mine even on this day, though it be 
 a Sabbath. I am like one who cannot leave his task till the night, when 
 no one can work. Night is coming erelong to me, when I shall cease from 
 all such labours, as the workman does at the close of day. As long as I 
 am in the world, I must be the light of men ; when I depart, the light will 
 be Avithdrawn." 
 
 He might have opened the eyes of the poor man by a word, but a great 
 lesson Avas to be taught His enemies. He wished to protest once more 
 against the hypocritical strictness of the Kabbinical observance of the 
 Sabbath, which so entirely destroyed the true significance of the holy day. 
 He Avould shoAV that it was in full accordance Avith the office of the Messiah, 
 not only Himself to do what the dominant party denounced as Work, on 
 the Sabbath, but to require it also from him whom He cured. 
 
 It was the belief, in antiquity, that the saliva of one who Avas fasting 
 was of benefit to weak eyes, and that clay relieved those who suffered 
 from tumours on the eyelids. It may be that Jesus thought of this ; at 
 any rate, stooping to the ground, and mixing saliva Avith some of the dust, 
 He touched the eyes of the blind man with it, and then sent him to Avash 
 it off in the pool of Siloam. It was impossible that the clay or the water 
 could restore the eyesight ; but Jesus had once more asserted His right 
 to do Avorks of mercy on the Sabbath, in oi^position to the narroAV pre- 
 tences of the Pharisees, and the faith of the inan himself was put to 
 the test. He fortliAvith did as commanded, and his sight was at once 
 made perfect. 
 
 Full of childish delight at the possession of the new amazing sense, the 
 man must liaA'e attracted attention, even where the change Avrought in his 
 appearance prevented his being recognised. He Avas well known in the 
 city as a beggar, blind from his birth. Presently, some asked, doubting 
 their senses, "If this were not he who sat every day begging ?" "It is 
 he," said one. " It is some one like him," said others. " I am he," said 
 the man. " How did you get your sight, then ? " asked a number at once. 
 The man told them. " Where is this Jesus ? " they asked again ; but he 
 could not tell. 
 
 It Avas clear that another great miracle had been performed by the 
 Teacher Avhom the authorities denounced; and, hence, from Avhatever 
 motive, the man was taken before them. The sight of him might change 
 their feelings toAvards Jesus, for even they did not pretend to deny the
 
 THE LAST MONTH OF THE YEAR. 553 
 
 supernatural power of their hated opponent, though they tried to attribute 
 it to the help of the Prince of Devils. 
 
 Brought before the dignitaries of the Law and Temple, the man had to 
 repeat the story of his cure. The miracle could not be denied; but the 
 character of Christ might, at least, be discredited, for it appeared that He 
 had dared to break the Sabbath both in act and word. " This man is not 
 of God," said some of the Council, " for does not the Law expressly forbid 
 the anointing of the eyes with saliva on the Sabbath, as ivorh. And, 
 besides, no healing is permitted on the Sabbath except when life is in 
 danger." 
 
 " How could a man that commits sin work such miracles ?" replied some 
 of the more liberal-minded. " God would never give such power to such 
 a person. There is something special that needs looking into in this case 
 of what 3^ou call Sabbath-breaking, before you decide so confidently." 
 
 They were hopelessly divided, and at last, like Orientals, resolved to get 
 the opinion of the man himself. They asked him, therefore, what he 
 thought of Him who had cured him. " I think Him a prophet," answered ! 
 the sturdy confessor. But it would never do to admit this, for even the { 
 Eabbis owned that a prophet might dispense with the laws of the Sabbath. 
 
 The hostile party in the Council were in a strait, and would fain deny 
 tlie fact of the miracle altogether. They would, at least, require more 
 evidence than the man's own word. Sending the officers for his parents, 
 therefore, they had them brought before them, and asked them : 
 
 " Is this your son, who, as you say, was born blind ? How comes he to 
 see, if that were so ?" But the question brought no relief, for the parents 
 shrcAvdly refused to commit themselves beyond the bare acknowledgment 
 that he was their son, and that he had been born blind. " He is of age 
 — ask him," added they. Nor was their caution unjustified, for they had 
 heard that if any one acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, he would be 
 " put out of the synagogue ; " a punishment involving the direst conse- 
 quences socially and religiously. It was, in fact, the lesser excommuni- A . 
 cation, which lasted thirty clays, but might be lengthened for continued ' 
 
 impenitence, or curtailed by contrition. It shut a person iitterly from the ,' 
 synagogue, for even if he entered it, he was reckoned as not present ; no j \ 
 mourning for the dead, and no rite of circumcision could take place in his \ 
 house, and no one but his wife or child could come within four cubits of 
 him. 
 
 The discomfited Council could only fall back on the man himself. " He 
 miast," they told him, " take care of himself, else they would have to deal 
 with him. He had better tell the whole truth, and confess what he knew 
 about this Jesus, and thus show that he feared God, by giving Him the 
 glory ; for we know very well," said they, " that this man is a sinner." 
 But he was neither to be brow-beaten nor dragooned, and would not yield 
 an inch to either threats or persuasions. " It is a very strange thing," 
 said he, " that j'ou talk about Him so. I can say nothing about His being 
 a sinner ; I only know that whereas I was blind, now I see." 
 
 Foiled once more, they fell back on their first question. " What is it 
 you say He did to you? Hoav was it He opened vour eyes ?" But they
 
 1)54 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 had to do with one of sterner and manlier stnfl: than most. " I told you 
 all that already," replied he, "and yon did not listen ; "vvhy do j-on "wish to 
 hear it again ? Are you, also, like me, inclined to become His disciples ?" 
 
 The court was not accustomed to be treated with so little deference and 
 awe ; their pride and dignity were sadly fluttered, and they forgot both in 
 their excitement. With the passionate heat of Orientals, they stooped to 
 insult and wrangle vv'ith the humble creature at their bar. As they could 
 get nothing against Jesus from him, they branded him as His disciple, 
 " Yoti are a discijjle of this Galilasan ; toe are the disciples of Moses, the 
 man of God : we know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, 
 we know not who has sent Him— it must have been Beelzebub, at best." 
 
 Unabashed, and true-hearted, the man was not to be put down by cither 
 priest or Rabbi. " Well, this is very strange," retorted he. " You say you 
 don't know who has sent Him, and yet He has opened my eyes ! A man 
 who has done that, must, as you know, have come from God, and bo no 
 sinner ; for every one knows that God alone can give power to work such 
 a miracle, and He does not hear sinners, but only those who worship Him 
 truly, and do His will. So wonderful an instance of the power of God 
 being granted to any man has never been heard of, as that which has been 
 granted to this Jesus ; for, from the beginning of the world such a thing 
 was never known, as the opening of the eyes of a man born blind, even by 
 the greatest of the prophets. There is no such thing in any part of the 
 Law or the Prophets. If this man were not from God, He could do nothing." 
 
 " What ! " screamed several voices at once. " You, a creature tainted to 
 your very soul with sin, before your bii'th, and born with its miserable 
 punishment on you — you, au out-and-out worthless wretch — do you ven- 
 ture to teach us ? You are excommunicated." And so they cast him out 
 of the synagogue, there and then. 
 
 The report of this incident soon reached Jesus. The blind beggar was 
 the first confessor in the New Kingdom, and its Lord lost no time in 
 acknowledging and strengthening one who had owned Him fearlessly 
 before the very Council itself. Seeking him out, and telling him He had 
 heard of his grateful fidelity, He added, "You believe on the Son of God, 
 do you not ? " The name, as that of Jesus Himself, had not reached him, 
 but he knew it as one of the titles of the expected Messiah. " Who is He, 
 Lord," asked he, instantlj^ " that I may believe on Him?" "Thou hast 
 seen Him, even now," answered Jesus, " and it is He who talks with thee." 
 It was enough. The healed one had before him the mysterious Being 
 whose power towards himself had shown him to be "the messenger sent 
 of God," Him whom he had only now confessed. " Lord," said he, " I 
 believe," and rendered Him, forthwith, the worship due to the Messiah, 
 God's anointed. 
 
 Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered, as the beggar, now seeing not only 
 with bodily but spiritual eyes, threw himself at His feet. It was a 
 moment of deep emotion. Addressing Himself to those around, among 
 whom, as usiial, were some of the ever-watchful Eabbis, Jesus seized the 
 opportunity for a few more words of warning. 
 
 " I am come into the world," said He, " fan in hand, to separate the
 
 THE LAST MONTH OF THE TEAR. 555 
 
 wheat from the chaff, and to bring a judgment-like division among men. 
 The poor in spirit who feel their need of Divine truth, and mourn their 
 spiritiial blindness, are enlightened by me, but those wlio think they see, 
 and fancy they know the truth, are shown to be blind, and are shut out 
 from my kingdom, to the blindness they have chosen." 
 
 " Are we blind, then ? " asked some of 'the Rabbis in the crowd. He 
 had classed them as those who fancied they alone saw, and their pride 
 was roused by His venturing to speak of them, the teachers of the nation, 
 as ])lind— language so opposed to the servility shown them as a rule. 
 
 " Blind ? " replied Jesus, " it would l)e well if you were so ; for, in that 
 case, your disbelief in me would not be sinful. It would not show a wilful 
 resistance to Divine truth, but only that you liad not yet attained the 
 knowledge of it. But since you claim to sec, it makes your unbelief 
 criminal, and deepens your guilt ; for it is your spiritual pride which leads 
 you to reject me, and thus keeps you from l^elieving, and so receiving 
 pardon." 
 
 In the East, as in lonely mountainous districts of our own country, the 
 relation of a slicpherd to his flock is very different from the mechanical 
 and indifferent one of some other parts. The loneliness of pastoral life in 
 these countries throws man and the creatures he tends so much together 
 — binds them so to each other by a sense of companionship, of dangers 
 shared, and pleasures mutually enjoyed — that the Eastern shepherd, like 
 his counterpart on our own mountains, forgets the distance between 
 himself and his flock, and becomes their friend. Nor is the sense of 
 dependence only on his side. The sheep are drawn to their protector as 
 much as he to them. They ai'e all to each other. They share in common 
 the silence and lonely magnificence of the mountains or the desert. We 
 learn to love that for which we brave peril ; and the dangers of torrents, 
 of robbers, of wolves, of tliirst, or of straying, endear, to the Oriental, the 
 flock for which they are borne, as the dangers of winter storms, or moun- 
 tain mists, and the thousand incidents of pastoral life in wild districts, do 
 with our Highland shepherds. 
 
 Nothing, therefore, could be more touching, in a pastoral counti-y like 
 Palestine, than images of care or tenderness drawn from shepherd life, 
 and such Jesus now introduced with surpassing beauty. 
 
 " I have come into the world," said He, in effect, " to gather together 
 into a great fold the new Israel of God. He who enters by the door is a 
 true and authorized under shepherd, but any who enter otherwise are not 
 true leaders and shepherds, but are like thieves and robbers, who climb 
 over the wall for evil ends. 
 
 " When the true shepherd thus enters by the door, the sheep he tends 
 hear his voice, and he calls them by name, and leads them out. And 
 when he has led forth all his on-n, he goes before them, as the shepherds 
 before their sheep, and his flock follow him, because they know his voice. 
 And, as a stranger, who is not the shepherd known by a flock, scatters it 
 in alarm, as soon as the sheep hear his voice, so, while true shepherds are 
 recognised as such by the spiritual Israel, pretenders are known by their 
 words, and shunned." The drift of this parable, or allegory, was suffi-
 
 556 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 ciently trauspai'cnt, but those at whom it was pointed were too self-satisfied 
 to recognise it. Tliey declai'ed it unintelligible. 
 
 Jesus, therefore, felt Himself necessitated to repeat the main thought, 
 and thus enforce it on their attention. 
 
 "I see," said He, " that you do not understand the parable I have just 
 delivered : let me explain it. I tell you with the utmost solemnity, I am 
 the one only Door of the fold of the flock of God. Other teachers have 
 sought to lead you in your day, but all who have done so, before my 
 coming, are like the thieves and robbers who enter a fold over the wall. 
 I frankly tell you I mean the priests and Rabbis, my enemies. They have 
 refused to enter, through me, the Door, and have rejected me. But the 
 true sheep of God — the spiritual Israel — have not listened to them. Note 
 well, as I repeat it — I, alone, am the Door of the true fold of the flock of 
 God. If any one enter by me into the fold, as a shepherd or teacher and 
 leader of the flock, he, himself, will be saved in the world to come, and 
 preserved to life eternal, and will have free entrance to the sheep here, to 
 lead them out to pasture. He who does not thus enter through me, seeks 
 the sheep only for selfish and evil ends ; like the thief, who, avoiding the 
 door, climbs over into the fold, to steal, kill, and destroy. I may call 
 myself, in opposition to such false shepherds, not only the Door, but the 
 Good Shepherd, for I have come, not to destroy the flock of God, but to 
 give them true abiding life in my kingdom, and that with all fulness and 
 delight of spiritual joys. 
 
 " I am, indeed, the Good Shepherd, for I come to lay down my life for 
 the sheep. But he who is a hireling and not a true shepherd — he who 
 seeks to lead and teach the flock of God, not from love and self-sacrifice, 
 but for gain ; the hypocrite who jn-etends to be a shepherd— sees the 
 powers of evil coming like a ravening wolf, to tear the flock by perse- 
 cutions ; and flees, and leaves it to its fate, so that they snatch off many, 
 and scatter all. He thus flees because he is only a hireling, thinking of 
 himself and caring nothing for the sheep. 
 
 " I, once more, am the Good Shepherd, and no hireling, for I know my 
 sheep, and they know me with such deep communion of love and spiritual 
 life as thei-e is between my heavenly Father and myself ; and I shall 
 presently lay down my life for them. Yet not for those of Israel alone. 
 I have other sheep, of other lands, and them also I must lead into the one 
 fold, that there may be but one flock, under me, the one Shepherd. 
 
 "But this triumphal issue can be reached only by my death and resur- 
 rection; yet I rejoice to die thus for the sheep, since the love of my 
 heavenly Father rests on me, because I give myself for them. I die freely, 
 of my own choice, a Avilling self-sacrifice. No one takes my life from me, 
 but I lay it down of myself. I am sent forth by my Father, as the Mes- 
 siah, and, as such, lay down my life and take it again, not to carry out any 
 purpose of my own, but to complete the great jolan of salvation God has 
 designed. It is in obedience to His Divine command I thus freely give 
 myself up to death, and it is to complete the gracious i:)lan of mercy 
 tOAvards the flock which my death will redeem, that I shall rise again from 
 the grave as their Great Shepherd, to guide them to heaven."
 
 A WANDERIXG LIFE. 557 
 
 Had tlie bigoted crowd known the full significance of some of these 
 words, they would have risen against Jesus once more ; for the future ad- 
 mission of the heathen into the New Kingdom of God was more distinctly'- 
 intimated than ever before. As the end of His work drew nearer, the 
 narrow j^rejudices even of the Twelve were ever more constantly kept in 
 view, and the thought that the kingdom He was founding must embrace 
 all nations, daily enforced. 
 
 But neither this wide catholicity, which a Jew would have held as 
 treason to his nation, nor the mysterious allusions to His own futui'e, were 
 rightly understood. The old slander that " He had a devil, and was mad 
 in consequence, and not worthy to be listened to," rose from the lips of 
 some, and the best that even the most liberal among the crowd co^ild say 
 w^as the negative praise — " These are not the words of one who is pos- 
 sessed." Besides, though a devil might, perhaps, work some miracles 
 through man as its instrument, it was impossible to believe that it either 
 would or could work one so beneficent and stuiDcndous as the opening of. 
 the eyes of one who had been born blind. 
 
 CHAPTER LII. 
 
 A WANDEUING LIFE. 
 
 IT was now near the end of Chislev, "the cold month," equivalent to 
 part of our November and December. The twenty-fifth of the month, 
 which, according to Wieseler, fell, this year, on the 20th December, was, 
 with the next seven days, a time of universal rejoicing ; for the Dedication 
 Festival, in commemoration of the renewal of the Temple worship, after 
 its suspension under Antiochus Epiphanes, was held through the week. 
 
 Jesus, ever pleased to mingle in innocent joys, and glad to seize the 
 opportunity for proclaiming the New Kingdom, which the gatherings of 
 the season afforded, once more returned to Jerusalem to attend it. He 
 had been in the neighbourhood since the Feast of Tabernacles, nearly three 
 months before, and this visit would be the last, till His final entry, to die. 
 
 The weather had been wet and rough, so that He was fain to avail Him- 
 self, like the crowds, of the shelter of the arcade running along the east 
 side of the Temple enclosure, known as Solomon's Porch, from the frag- 
 ment of the first Temple, left standing by Nebuchadnezzar. 
 
 The raiu drove the peojole from the open courts, and Jesus, like others, 
 was in the porch, apparently without His disciples. The time was fitted 
 to wake the old temptation of ambition, had it had any charms. How easily 
 might He eclipse the hero of all this rejoicing, and by His supernatural 
 power achieve victories, compared with which those of Judas Maccabteus 
 would be nothing ! But His aims were far nobler. 
 
 Such secret thoughts may have risen among the Pharisaic party, them- 
 selves, respecting Him. Be this as it may, they now suddenly came and 
 began to ask Him if He would not, at last, relieve their minds by some 
 direct and express declaration whether He were the Messiah or not. It 
 may be, He could read in their looks that He needed only to speak a woj-d
 
 558 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 to have their support, and He knew that both they and the nation, at such 
 a time, were ready to flame into universal enthusiasm for any chief who 
 would undertake to lead them against Rome. But earthly ambition had 
 no attractions for His pure spirit. 
 
 " We have waited long and anxiously," said they, " for some decisive 
 word. If Thou art the Messiah, tell us openly." 
 
 " I have already told you," answered Jesus, " both by the witness of the 
 miracles I have done in my Father's name, and in words ; but you havo 
 not believed me, because, as I said not long ago, you are nob my disciples, 
 or, as I love to call them, my sheep. If you had been, you would have be- 
 lieved in me. You may, yourselves, see that you are not of my flock, for 
 those who are so listen to my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, 
 as sheej) know and listen to the voice of their shepherd, and are known 
 by him, and follow him. ZSTothing, indeed, can be more close and abiding 
 than my relations to them, for I lead them not to mere earthly good, but 
 give them eternal life, and am their shepherd hereafter as well as here; 
 taking care that they shall never perish, and that no one, even beyond 
 death, shall snatch them out of my hand. Moreover, being in my hand, 
 they are, in reality, in that of my Father, for He is ever with me, and 
 woi'ks by me. He gave them to me at first, and He still guards them, nor 
 can any one snatch them from His hands, for He is greater than all the 
 powers of earth and hell. "Wonder not that I speak of their being both in 
 my Father's hands and in mine, for I and the Father are One." 
 
 The excitable, fanatical crowd had listened patiently till the last words, 
 which seemed the most audacious blasphemy— a claim of essential oneness 
 with the Almighty. Scattering themselves in a moment once more in 
 search of stones, with which to kill Him for what they deemed His crime, 
 they presently gathered round Him again Avith them, to fell Him to the 
 earth. But Jesus remained undismayed. " I have done many great works 
 of mercy," said He, calmly, " which show that the Father is with me, be- 
 cause they could only come from the presence of His power. They arc 
 enough to show you that He thinks me no blasphemer. For which of 
 these mighty works will you stone me ? " 
 
 " We would not think of stoning Thee for a good work," answered the 
 crowd ; " it is for your blasphemy ; that you, a man, should make yourself 
 God." 
 
 '■' Is it not written in your Law," rejalied Jesus, " of the rulers of Israel, 
 the representatives and earthly embodiments of the majesty of Jehovah, 
 your invisible King, ' I said, Ye are gods ?' If God Himself called them 
 gods, to whom this utterance of His came— and you cannot deny the 
 authority of Scripture — how can you say of me, — whom the Father has 
 consecrated to a far higher office than ruler, or even prophet, to that of 
 Messiah ; and whom He has not only tlius set apart to this great office, 
 but sent into the world clothed with the mighty powers I have shown, and 
 the fulness of grace and truth you now see in me,— that I blaspheme, 
 because I have said I am God's Son ? Your unbelief in me, which is the 
 ground of the charge, would have some excuse if I did not perform such 
 works as prove me to have been «nt by my Father. But if I do such
 
 A WANDEBING LIFE. 559 
 
 works, then believe them, if you will not believe me ; tliat you may thus 
 learn and know that what I have said is true, that the Father is in me, 
 and I in the Father." 
 
 They had waited for a retractation, but had heard a defence. Instantly, 
 hands were thrust out on every side, to lay hold on Him, and lead Him 
 outside the Temple, to stone Him ; but He shrank back into the crowd, 
 and passing through it, escaped. 
 
 Jerusalem and Judea were evidently closed against Him, as Galilee had 
 been for some time past. There seemed only one district in any measure 
 safe — the half-heathen territory of Perea, across the Jordan. The ecclesi- 
 astical authorities and the people at large, instead of accepting Him, and 
 the spiritual salvation He offered, had become steadily more obdurate and 
 hostile. It was necessary at last to give up all attempts to win them, and 
 to retire, for the short time that yet remained to Him, to this safer district. 
 He chose the part of it in which John had begun his ministrations; per- 
 haps in hopes of a more hopeful soil, from the cherished remembrance of 
 His predecessor, — perhaps as a spot sacred to holy associations of His 
 own. 
 
 Here, with His wonted earnestness. He once more proclaimed the New 
 Kingdom, and was cheered by a last flicker of success ; for crowds once 
 more resorted to Him, many of whom became His disciples. " John," said 
 they, " did no miracles, great though he was, Init his testimony to this 
 Man, who was to come after him, that He was greater than himself, is 
 true ; for not only does He teach us the words of truth, He confirms them 
 by mighty wonders, which show Him to be the Messiah." Jesus was 
 reaping, as Bengel says, the posthumous fruit of the Baptist's work. 
 
 The quiet retreat of Perea was, however, soon to be broken. The family 
 of Bethany, to whom Jesus owed so many happy hours, had been in health 
 when He left, but a message suddenly reached Him from the two sisters, 
 Mary and Martha, the very simplicity of which still touches the heart : 
 '* Lord, he whom Thou lovest, our brother Lazarus, is sick." His love, 
 they felt, would need nothing more. The messengers doubtless expected 
 that He would have returned with them at once ; but He saw things in a 
 higher light, and moved on a different spiritual plane. Instead of going 
 with them therefore. He dismissed them, with the intimation that the 
 sickness would not really end in death, but would be overruled by God 
 to His own glory, by disclosing that of His Son — Jesus Himself. It was 
 from no indifference that He thus delayed, though it left His friends to 
 bitter disappointment, and Himself to the suspicion of neglect. " Ho 
 loved Martha and her sister, and Lazarus," says John. But still He 
 delayed, in obedience to a higher counsel than that of man. 
 
 The messengers had taken a day to come, and it would take another for 
 Jesus to go to Bethany ; but though He knew this. He remained two days 
 more in the place where the sad news had reached Him. On the third 
 day, however. He surprised His disciples, who had fancied that He 
 hesitAted from fear of His enemies, by telling them that He was about to 
 return to Judea. 
 
 " The Rabbis and priests were seeking only the other day to stone Thee,
 
 5G0 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Rabbi," said tliey iu amazement; "and art Thou really going back into 
 the very jaws of danger ? " 
 
 " The time allotted me by God for my work," replied Jesus, " is not yet 
 done, and so long as it lasts no one can harm me. The time a])pointed 
 for a man is like the hours of light given to a ti-aveller for his journey. 
 There is no fear of his stumbling in the day, because he sees the sun ; but 
 as he stumbles when it has set, so man, though he walk safely till the 
 appointed time ends, can do so no longer when it is over. Till mine is 
 over, I am safe." 
 
 Pausing a few minutes. He went on to tell them why He was going to 
 Bethany, in spite of all danger. " Our friend Lazarus," said He, " has 
 fallen asleep, but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." Unwilling to 
 expose themselves or their Master to unnecessary i^eril, their wishes read 
 in these words a cause for remaining where they were. " To sleep is good 
 for the sick," said they, thinking He spoke of natural sleep. But their 
 hopes were speedily dashed. " Lazarus," said He, now openly, " is dead, 
 and I am glad for your sakes, that I was not there to heal him from mere 
 sickness. The far greater proof of my Divine glory, which you will see 
 in my raising him from the grave, would not have been given, and thus 
 you would have lost the aid to still firmer trust in me, which is so necessary 
 now I am so soon to leave you." 
 
 Such words might have at once quieted their fears and kindled their 
 zeal ; but they still saw in His return to Judea only a journey to His own 
 death. Thomas the Twin at last broke silence : " It becomes us to do all 
 that our Master commands, even when He asks us to risk our lives. Let 
 us go with Him, that we may show our love and fidelity by dying with 
 Him." A true-hearted but sad man ! 
 
 It is clear that Jesus feared violence, for as He api^roached Bethany, 
 He lingered outside the village, as if to learn liow^ matters stood, before 
 venturing farther. Nor was it without cause, for notwithstanding their 
 friendship with Jesus, the family of Lazarus, moving in good society as 
 they did, had many friends and connections amongst those hostile to Himi 
 and a number of these had come to pay the customary visit of condolence 
 to the two sisters. 
 
 The four days since the death had been sad ones in the little household. 
 They had fasted all the day after it, and had since eaten nothing but an 
 occasional egg, or some lentils ; for that was the only food allowed 
 mourners for the first seven days. The corpse, which had had a lamp 
 burning beside it from the moment of death, as a symbol of the immor- 
 tality of the soul, had been borne to the grave after a few hours, an egg 
 had been broken as a symbol of mortality, and the cottage left to the two 
 survivors. The funeral procession had been sad enough, with its dirge 
 flutes, and hired wraling women ; the two sisters and their relations fol- 
 lowing, and then the neighbours and friends ; for it was held a religious 
 duty in all who could, to attend a corpse to the grave. At the grave's 
 mouth, the men had chanted the sublime nineteenth Psalm in a slow 
 circuit of seven times round the bier, on which lay the dead wrapped in 
 white linen. The long procession, headed by the women veiled, had
 
 A WANDERING LIFE. 561 
 
 stopped thrice on the way to the grave, while the leader spoke words of 
 comfort to the bereaved ones, and tender exhortations to passers by, — 
 " Comfort ye, comfort ye, ye dear ones ! Lift up your souls, lift up your 
 souls ! Come to me, all ye who are of sad and troubled heart, and take 
 part in the sorrow of your neighbours." 
 
 Once more in their desolate home, the sisters, with veiled heads, even 
 in their own chamber, and with unsandalled feet, sat down on the earth, 
 in the midst of a circle of at least ten friends or professional mourners 
 with rent clothes and dust on their heads. None spoke till the bereaved 
 ones had done so, but every sentence of theirs was followed by some word 
 of s^mijiathy and comfort, and by the wails of the mourners. And thus 
 it would be for seven days, and had been for four, before Jesus arrived, 
 for many friends had come from Jerusalem to comfort the two sisters. 
 
 "Word was presently brought to the house, that Jesus had come, and 
 forthwith, Martha, true to her character as the more active of the two 
 sisters, rose fi'om the ground, where she and Mary had been sitting, and 
 went out, wrapped in her mourning dress and deeply veiled, to go to Him ; 
 but Mary remained where she was, for she had not heard the good news. 
 
 " Lord," said Martha, when she saw Him, " if Thou hadst been here, 
 my brother would not have died," as if she thought, " Why did He then 
 delay ? " But as she looked at Him her faith revived, and she added, 
 " Yet though he be dead, I know that God will grant you your utmost 
 prayer, even if it be to receive back Lazarus from the dead." 
 
 " Your brother will rise again," replied Jesus, in designedly ambiguous 
 words, to lead Martha's faith from mere personal interest to higher 
 thoughts. Martha understood Him only of the resurrection at the last 
 day, in which she felt assured Lazarus would have part, and had hoped 
 for something so much nearer and greater, that so vague an answer disap- 
 pointed her. She could only find words to say, with sad resignation, that 
 "she knew that he would rise," as Jesus had seemed to say, "at the last 
 day." 
 
 It was well she answered thus, for Jesus presently used her words to 
 turn her from mere personal interests to Himself, and in doing so, uttered 
 that wondrous sentence which has carried hope and triumph to millions 
 of the dying and the bereaved, and will do so while time and mortality 
 endui'e. "I" — and no other but I — "am the EesiTrrection and the Life. 
 He that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and avIio- 
 soever liveth and believeth on me shall never die " — words which we may 
 paraphrase thus : " I am He whose is tbe power to raise from the dead, 
 and make alive for evermore. He that believeth in me, though his body 
 die, will yet continue to live without break or interruption ; for, till the 
 resurrection, he will be in paradise, and after it, and by its means, he will 
 enter on the fulness of life eternal. And every one who is still alive, and 
 believes in me, will never die, in any true sense ; for the death of the 
 body is not really death, but the open gate into life eternal. Believest 
 thou this ? " 
 
 " Yea, Lord," sobbed out the stricken heart. " I believe that Thou art 
 the King-Messiah, the Son of God, who was to come into the world; " and 
 

 
 662 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 having made this great confession, she went away to call her sister 
 secretly, for fear of those hostile to Him among her own friends. " Mary," 
 whispered she, " the Teacher is here, and calls for thee." She would not 
 mention the name, for caution. 
 
 It was enough. The next instant Mary was on the road to Jesus, who 
 was still outside the village, in the place where Martha had met Him. 
 The way to the grave was in that direction, and the friends, concluding 
 she had gone thither to weep, kindly rose and followed her, that she might 
 not be left to her lonely grief. Jesus could no longer remain hidden, hut 
 the presence of hostile witnesses confirmed the more strikingly the great 
 miracle that was to follow. 
 
 Falling in tears at the feet of Jesus, and cmhraciug them, Mary's full 
 heart overflowed in the same lament as her sister's, for they had often 
 spoken the same words to each other : " Lord, if Thou hadst been here, 
 my brother had not died." The presence of her friends, who she knew 
 were no friends of His, hindered more. It was a moment fitted to move 
 even a strong heart, for those around, with true Oriental demonstrative- 
 ness, wept and lamented aloud, along with Mary. But the sight of men 
 who were filled with the bitterest enmity to Himself, joining in lamenta- 
 tions with Mary, His true-hearted friend — men with no sympathy for the 
 highest goodness, but ready to chase it, in His person, from the earth, 
 because it condemned their cold religious hypocrisy — showing natural 
 tenderness while such malignity was in their hearts, roused his indigna- 
 tion, so that he visibly shuddered with emotion, and had to restrain Him- 
 self by an earnest effort. Yet the cloud of righteous anger passed off in 
 a moment, and sorrow for His friend, and for the grief of the loved one 
 at His feet, asserted itself. Silent tears trickled down His cheeks, for, 
 though He was the Son of God, He was, also, no less truly than ourselves 
 a man moved by the sight of human sorrow. 
 
 The group of mourners were variously affected, the most kindly remark- 
 ing how dearly He must have loved the dead man, that He should now 
 weep so at his death. But the more malicious and hardened only saw in 
 His tears a welcome proof of His helplessness, for had it been otherwise, 
 could He not as well have cured Lazarus of his illness as give sight to the 
 blind ? The healing of the blind man must surely have been a cheat, for 
 certainly He would have come to Bethany sooner, had He been able to do 
 anything for His sick friend. The muttered words reached the ear of 
 Jesus, and roused anew His indignation ; and thus, with mingled anger 
 and sorrow. He reached the grave. 
 
 Like most tombs in the limestone districts of Palestine, it was a recess 
 cut in the side of a natural cave, and closed by a huge stone fitted into a 
 groove. 
 
 In this gloomy niche lay Lazarus, swathed from head to foot in loose 
 linen wrappings, and now four days dead. 
 
 "Take away the stone," said Jesus. 
 
 But Martha, with her plain matter-of-fact nature, shrank at the words, 
 for she thought of the awful spectacle of her Ijrother, now hastening to 
 corruption. Christ's words about the resurrection had taken away any
 
 A WANDERING LIFE. 563 
 
 hope of seeing Lazarus alive again till the great day, and she would rather 
 the sacred remains were left undisturbed. A gentle reproof from Jesus 
 was, however, enough to let her leave Him to His will. " Did not I send 
 word to thee by thy messenger, that if thou wouldst only believe thou 
 shouldst see the glory of God ? " So they took away the stone. 
 
 Jesus had already, in the stillness of His own breast, communed with 
 the Father, and knew, in Himself, that His prayer that Lazarus might be 
 restored to life had been heard. Lifting u]) His eyes to heaven. He now 
 uttered His thanks that it had been -so. " Father, I thank Thee that Thou 
 hast heard me — yet I knew that Thou hearcst me always, for Thy will is 
 ever mine, and mine is ever Thine. But I thank Thee thus, for the sake of 
 those who stand around, that they may be convinced that what I do is 
 done in Thy power, and that I am assuredly sent forth from Thee." 
 
 What followed is best given in the words of St. John. " And when He 
 had thus spoken, He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come foktii. And 
 he that was dead came forth, Ijound hand and foot with grave-clothes ; 
 and his face had been bound about with a napkin (that had tied up his 
 jaw four days before, when it fell, in death). Jesus saith unto them, 
 ' Loose him, and let him go (home) : ' " and he who had been dead, noAV 
 freed from his grave-clothes, himself returned, in the fulness of youthful 
 strength and health, to the cottage from which he had been carried forth 
 on a bier four days before. 
 
 Of the after-history of Lazarus, with one momentary exception, we know 
 nothing, for none of the numerous traditions and legends respecting him 
 are reliable. He is said to have been thirty years old when he was raised 
 from the dead, and to have lived for thirty years after ; to have been of 
 royal descent ; to have owned a whole quarter of Jerusalem, and to have 
 been, by profession, a soldier. His bones were said to have been found in 
 the year a.d. 890, with those of Mary Magdalene, in the island of Cyprus ! 
 and the remains thus honoured were carried to Constantinople. Other 
 traditions take him to ]\Iarscilles, and speak of him as the first Christian 
 Bishop of that city. But the very extravagance of these legends shows 
 their worthlessness as history. 
 
 The results of the miracle were momentous to Jesus Himself. Many of 
 the party of the Rabbis who had come to comfort the sisters, found them- 
 selves constrained to believe in one whose claims were attested by an act 
 so transcendent and so indisputable. But some justified all that Jesus 
 had said of their malignity, ))y not onlj- shutting their eyes to what they 
 were determined not to admit, but by plajdng the informer to the ecclesias- 
 tical authorities. 
 
 The great ecclesiastical court of the nation, known in the Talmud as the 
 " Sanhedrim," had been in abeyance for many years, for there is no trace 
 of it during the whole period of the Herods, or of the Romans. The name, 
 indeed, occurs in the New Testament, but it is simply as the Greek Avord 
 for "an assembly," which was adopted by the Rabbis at a later period. 
 Herod had broken up the great Rabbinical council, and, henceforth, the 
 only authorities recognised as the fountains of Jewish Law were the 
 schools of such Rabbis as Hillel aud Shammai. There was no such thing
 
 564 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 as a legal Jewish court which had power to enforce its dccisious. The 
 authority gi*anted to the leading schools was only a tribute of confidence 
 in their soundness and W'isdom. Hence, in the days of Christ, there was- 
 no legal Jewish court in existence, and the criminal processes mentioned 
 in connection with Him, were only acts of assemblies which the high 
 priest for the time, the only representative of the old Theocracy recognised 
 by the supreme Eoman authority, called together in angry haste, inform- 
 ally, and which acted by no judicial rules of procedure. 
 
 Such an illegal gathering was summoned by the Sadducean chief priests 
 and the leading Pharisaic Eabbis, to discuss what should be done respect- 
 ing Jesus, now that the incontestable fact of the resurrection of Lazarus 
 had crowned all his preceding miracles. Having no idea of a Messiah 
 apart from political revolution to be inaugurated by Him, it seemed likely 
 that, if something were not done to put Him out of the way, the excite- 
 ment of the people, through His miracles, Avould become irresistible, and 
 lead to a national rising, fiercer even than that of Judas the Galiltean. To 
 the popular party, represented by the Pharisees present, this would be no 
 imdesirable issue ; but the courtly Sadducees shrank from any disturb- 
 ance, fearing that, in the end, the Eomans w^ould crush it w^ith their 
 legions, and, as a punishment, abolish the hierarchical constitution, which 
 gave them their wealth and position ; and, with it, the ecclesiastical and 
 civil laws which flattered the nation with an illusory independence. 
 
 The Temple, and all the far-reaching vested interests bound up with it, 
 had long existed only on sufferance, and would at once perish in the storm 
 of a national insurrection ; and the nation, stripped of its local laws, so 
 vital to a theocracy, would be secularized into a part of Rome, with the 
 hated imperial heathen law, instead of the laws of God and the Rabbis. 
 
 The acting high priest at this time was Joseph Caiaphas. He had been 
 appointed by the procurator, Yalerius Gratus, shortly before that governor 
 left the province, in A.D. 25, when Jesus was about twenty years of age, 
 and he continiied to hold his great office till the year a.d. 36, when he was 
 removed by the proconsul Vitellius, shortly after the recall of Pilate. He 
 was, in every w^ay, a creature of the Romans, and, as such, received little 
 respect from the nation, though his dignity secured him official authorit3^ 
 
 Rising in the meeting, which had been hitherto very divided and irre- 
 solute as to the wisest course to be taken, Caiaphas begged to give his 
 opinion : ' 
 
 " You know nothing at all," said he, " else you would not have so much 
 questioning and discussing. You have not considered that it is expedient 
 for you, in view of your interests as priests and Rabbis, that this one man 
 should die, to save Israel from the certain destruction that threatens it, if 
 you let Him stir iiji a Messianic revolt ; for, in that case, the whole nation 
 must jierish. The Romans will come Avith their legions and close our 
 Temple, annul our independence by abolishing our laws, and waste us 
 with fire and sword." 
 
 There could ])e no misconception of words so plain. They w^cre a dis- 
 tinct advice to those present to put Jesus to death, as the one way to save 
 themselves, and maintain things as they were in Church and State. Words
 
 A WANDERING LIFE. 565 
 
 SO momentous, for they decided the fate of Jesus, might well seem to St. 
 John no mere human utterance, but the involuntary expression, through 
 unworthy lips, of the near approach of the supreme act in the Divine plan 
 of mercy to mankind. 
 
 From that day the death of Jesus was only a question of time and 
 opportunity. Henceforth, the Jewish primate and his suffragans kept 
 steadily in view— in concert with their hereditary and deadly enemies, the 
 Rabbis — tlio arrest of Jesus, and His subsequent deatli. Their officers, or 
 any one hostile to Him, might apprehend Him at any moment. It was 
 clearly no longer possible for Him to show Himself openly, and He, there- 
 fore, retired with His disciples to a city called Eijlu-aim, now difficult of 
 identification. It seems to have been in the wild uncultivated hill-country, 
 north-east of Jerusalem, between the central towns and the Jordan valley. 
 A village now known as El Taiyibeh, on a conical hill, commanding a view 
 of the whole eastern slope of the country, the valley of the Jordan, and 
 the Dead Sea, though only sixteen miles from Jerusalem, has been thought 
 Ijy Dr. Eobinson the site. It answers at least in its secluded privacy, and 
 the ready access it offers to the still wilder regions beyond. 
 
 Only a few weeks remained of our Saviour's life, and these He had to 
 spend as a fugitive, to whom no place was safe. He had, however, the joy 
 of seeing the old enthusiasm of the multitudes revived, for Matthew and 
 Mark both speak of the great numbers who followed Him in this clos- 
 ing period, attracted, doubtless, more by the fame of His past miracles, 
 and by continuous displays of the same supernatural power towards the 
 diseased of every kind, than by His teaching. Yet there must have been 
 not a few " sheep " in such vast gatherings. The clouds were parting as 
 the day closed, and were being lit with sunset colours, before the night 
 darkened all. 
 
 From Ephraim He soon passed over the Jordan, to what, for the moment 
 seemed a safer retreat. The lesser excommunication, which had driv^eu 
 Him from the synagogues of Galilee and Judea, had perhajis expired, or 
 the bann may not have been effective in Perea ; for He once more had 
 access to these assemblies on the Sabbaths, and was allowed, as before, 
 to teach the people, who were thus most easily reached. It was impossible, 
 however, that He could long avoid collision with some or other of the 
 countless Eabbinical laws which fettered every movement of free spiritual 
 life, and, as in the past, the fanatical Sabbath laws offered the first occa- 
 sions of trouble. Two instances ai-e recorded by St. Luke. 
 
 As He was teaching on a Sabbath in the synagogue of one of the out- 
 lying towns of Perea — half Jewish, half heathen— He noticed in the 
 audience, behind the lattice which separated the women from the men, a 
 poor creature drawn together by a rheumatic affection, which had bowed 
 her frame so terribly that she could not raise herself erect. As she 
 painfully struggled into her place, Jesus saw her, and doubtless read, in 
 her supplicating looks, and in the very fact that she had come to the 
 House of God in spite of such physical infirmity, an evidence that she was 
 a fit subject for His pitying help. Eising, and calling across the congre- 
 gation to her, the welcome words fell on her ears — ""Woman, thou art
 
 56G THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 loosed from thine infirmity." The cure was instantaneous. In a moment 
 she was once more straight and whole, after eighteen years of deformity, 
 and her irrepressible thanks to God for the mercy vouchsafed her, rang 
 through the synagogue, and made a great commotion. 
 
 The head of the congregation, however, was a cold Rabbinical pedant. 
 Intensely professional, he could see nothing but an irregularity. It was 
 the Sabbath day, and the Eabbis had decided that no cure was lawful on 
 the Sabbath except where death was imminent. " Silence," cried he, in- 
 dignantly, " there are six days in which raen ought to work ; it would be 
 much more becoming if this person were to remember that ; and if you, 
 for your part, want to be healed by Him, see that you come on a week- 
 day, so that He have no excuse for breaking the holy Sabbath, by doing 
 the work of curing you on it." 
 
 Indignation flashed from the eyes of Jesus, and turning to the speaker. 
 He denounced his heartless formalism, so utterly opposed to the true 
 religion of which He was the official representative. " You, and the whole 
 class who think with you, are hypocritical actors," said He ; " your words 
 prove it, for they are contradicted by your daily conduct. Do you not on 
 the Sabbath loose j^our asses, or your oxen, from the manger, where they 
 are tied, and lead them away to water them ? And if so, ought not this 
 woman, a daughter of Abraham, and, as such, one of God's own people — 
 who is of unspeakably greater worth than any ox or ass — to be loosed to- 
 day, though it he the Sabbath, from this bond with which Satan has chained 
 her, for now, eighteen years ? " 
 
 There could be no reply to such a vindication. The ruler and his party 
 were silenced and put to shame before the quick-witted audience. The 
 worship of the letter had received another deadly blow. 
 
 A second incident, very similar, occurred soon after. One of the leading 
 Pharisees had invited Jesus to dine with him on the Sabbath, as the day 
 specially devoted to social entertainments by the Rabbis,— with the sinister 
 design of w'atching Him and reporting to those in authority. A number 
 of Rabbis and Pharisees had been invited to meet Him, but they had not 
 yet lain down to their meal, when a man, who had the dropsy, entered the 
 open door of the house with others, -who dropped in, with Oriental freedom, 
 to look on and stand about. In his case, no doubt, the motive of his 
 coming was that he might attract the notice of Jesus. He was afraid, 
 however, to speak, for fear of those present, and patiently waited to see 
 if Jesus would, of His own accord, cure him. He had not long to wait. 
 Looking at him, Jesus turned to the guests with the question He had 
 asked before, in similar circumstances: "Is it laAvful to heal on the 
 Sabbath, or is it not P " In their consciences they could not say it was 
 not ; but few men have the courage of their opinions when current senti- 
 ment runs the other way, so they said nothing. But silence Avas a virtual 
 affirmative, for, if it were wrong, it was their bounden duty, as the public 
 guardians of religion, to say so. Passing over, thcfefore, to the swollen 
 and wretched being. He put His hand on him, cured him at once, and sent 
 him aw\ay. Then, turning to the confused and baffled company, He com- 
 pleted their discomfiture by an appeal similar to that which He had made
 
 A WANDERING LIFE. 567 
 
 in the case of the woman healed shortly hefore. " Which of you, let me 
 ask, if his son, or even only his ox, had fallen into a pit, •u-ould not im- 
 mediately draw him out, on discovering it — even on the Sabbath ? " No 
 wonder that nothing further was said on the subject. 
 
 The couches on which the guests reclined at meals were arranged so as 
 to form three sides of a square, the fourth being left open, to allow the 
 servants to bring in the dishes. The right-hand couch was reckoned the 
 highest, and the others, the middle and the lowest, respectively, the places 
 on each couch being distiuguished in the same way, from the fact that the 
 guest who reclined with his head, as it were, in the bosom of hini behind, 
 seemed to be the lower of the two. The " highest place " on the highest 
 couch, was, thus, the " chief place " ; and human nature, the same in all 
 ages, inevitably made it be eagerly co\eted, while, as precedence was 
 marked by nearness to it, there was an almost equal anxiety to get as close 
 to it as possible. With the vanity and self-righteousness of a moribund 
 caste, there was no little scheming among the Rabbis for the best position, 
 and much anxiety on the part of the host not to give offence ; for to jilace 
 a Rabbi below any one not a Eabbi, or below a fcllow-Eabbi of lower stand- 
 ing, or younger, was an unpai'donable affront, and a discredit to religion 
 itself. The intolerable pride that had made one of their order, in the days \ 
 of Alexander Janna3us, seat himself betAveen Alexander and his queen, on ! 
 the ground that '" wisdom " made its scholars sit among princes, remained 
 unchanged. Such petty ambition, so unworthy in public teachers of morals 
 and religion, and so entirely in contrast with His own instructions to His 
 disciples, to seek no distinction but that of the deepest humility, did not fail 
 to strike the Geeat Guest, who had calmly taken the place assigned Him. 
 Addressing the company, He told them, " You are wi'ong in revealing your 
 wishes, and obtruding your self-assertion in such a way. Let me counsel 
 you how to act. If invited to a marriage feast, never take the chief place 
 on the couches, lest some one of higher standing for learning or piety come, 
 and your host ask j'ou to go down to a lower place, to make room for the 
 more honoured guest. Take, rather, the lowest place, when you enter, that 
 your host, when he comes in, may invite you to take a higher, and thus 
 honour you before all. Pride is its own punishment in this, as in far 
 graver matters ; for, whether before God or man, he who exalts himself 
 will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." 
 
 It was an old custom in Israel to invite the poorer neighbours to the 
 special meals on the consecrated flesh of offerings not used at the altar, 
 and on similar half -religious occasions, to brighten their poverty for the 
 moment by kindly hospitality. This beautiful usage was, in the time of 
 Jesus, among the things of the past, for the priest or Eabbi of His day 
 would have trembled at the thought of being defiled by contact witli 
 people whose position made it impossible to be as scrupulous in the obser- 
 A'ance of tlic endless legal injunctions demanded, as themselves. 
 
 The meal at which Jesus was now present was very possibly one to 
 which, in old times, such very different guests would have been asked. 
 Or, it may be, the luxury displayed drew the attention of One so simple 
 in His habits. Not a few neighbours, in very dilfcrent circumstances
 
 568 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 from the guests, had 2:)robably entered, to hjok on and listen, but caste 
 looked at them askance, as if they were an inferior race. Noticing this, 
 our Lord addressed Himself to the host in a friendly way : 
 
 " Have you ever thought what hospitality would yield you most plea- 
 sure ? When you wish on special occasions to give a dinner or supj)er, 
 the: e is one course on which you would look back upon with the purest 
 joy. Do not invite your rich friends to it, or your family or kinsmen, or 
 well-to-do neighbours. They will invite you in return, and this will de- 
 stroy the worth of your act, for which you exiaect a recompense from God 
 at the resurrection. Instead of such guests, invite the poor, the hungry, 
 the lame, the maimed, and the blind. If you entertain such, they will 
 reward you richly by their gratitude, and if j'ou have invited them from 
 an honest heart, as a duty, Grod Himself will remember it at the resurrec- 
 tion of the righteous." 
 
 One of the guests had listened attentively. The mention of the resur- 
 rection of the righteous, naturally, under the circumstances, raised the 
 thought of the heavenly banquet which the Rabbis expected to follow that 
 event. " Blessed are those," said he, " who shall eat bread at the great 
 feast in the Kingdom of God, after the resurrection. It would, indeed, be 
 Avell to give such entertainments as Thou hast named, which would be 
 thus so richly rei)aid in the world to come." 
 
 This remark gave Jesus an opportunity of delivering a parable which 
 must have run terribly counter to the jirejudices of the company. The 
 spirit of caste that i^re vailed in the hierarchical party, and their utter 
 want of sympathy for the down-trodden masses, were abhorrent to His 
 whole nature. It was daily clearer that the religious and moral impulse 
 by which He was to revolutionize the world, would never come from Israel 
 as a nation. The opportunity had been offered, and even pressed, but it 
 had been rejected, and hence He was free to proclaim the great truth, 
 which, for a time. He had held back, that the heathen, as well as the Jew, 
 was invited, on equal terms, to the privileges of the New Kingdom of God. 
 It was specially necessary in these last months of His life to make this 
 prominent, that the minds of the disciples, above all, might be prepared 
 for a revolution of thought so momentous and signal. He therefore, now, 
 took every opportunity of showing that the invitations of the New King- 
 dom, in fulfilment of the eternal purpose of God, were to be addressed as 
 freely to the heathen as to Israel, and that the religion He was founding 
 was one of spirit, and truth, and liberty, for the whole world. This 
 revelation, so transcendent in the history of the race. He once more dis- 
 closed, had they been able to understand Him, at the Pharisee's table. 
 
 " A certain man," said He, as if in answer to the last speaker, " made a 
 great supper, and sent out invitations to many guests ; giving them ample 
 time to prepare, and to keep themselves free from other engagements. 
 When the night fixed for a banquet came, he sent his servant, moreover, 
 once more, as is usual, to those invited, to say that all was ready, and to 
 pray them to come. But though they had had ample time to make all 
 arrangements, they were still alike busy and unconcerned about the invi- 
 tation, and, as if by common agreement, each in turn excused himself from
 
 IN PEREA. 569 
 
 acceptiug it. ' I have just bought a field,' said oue, ' aud must go and see 
 it ; I beg} our master will hold rae excused,' aud went off to his laud. ' Ifc 
 is impossible for me to come,' said another, 'for I have just bought live 
 yoke of oxen, and am on the point of starting to try them.' A third 
 begged to be excused because he had just been married, and could not 
 come, as he had a feast of his own. 
 
 "The servant had, therefore, to return to his master with this sorry list 
 of excuses, each of which was a marked affront. ' T shall see that my 
 feast has not been prepai-ed for nothing,' said the intending liost; ' go out, 
 at once, to the streets and lanes of the cit}', and bring in all the poor, the 
 maimed, the blind, aud the lame you can find, that my table may be filled.' 
 
 " Tliere being still room, however, after this had been done, the house- 
 holder further ordered the servant to go outside the city to the country 
 roads and hcKlgeways, and gather any waifs and beggars he found, and 
 compel them to come in, for his house must be filled, aud none of the men 
 he invited to his supper shoidd taste it." 
 
 Had the hearers but known it, this parable was a deadly thrust at their 
 most cherished prejudices. The priests and Rabbis, leaders of the nation, 
 had been invited again and again, by Jesus and His disciples, to the spiri- 
 tual banquet of the New Kingdom, but they had des2:)iscd the invitation, 
 oi; any excuse, or on none. The poor and outcast peo]ile, the sinners and 
 publicans, and the hated multitude, Avho neglected the Ral^binical rules, 
 had then been summoned, and had gladly come, and, now, the invitation 
 was to go forth to those outside Israel — the aljhorred heathen — and tho}-, 
 too, were to come freely, and sit down at the great table of the kingdom 
 of the Messiah, with no conditions or disabilities ; while those who, in 
 their pride, had refused the invitation, were finally rejected. 
 
 It was the proclamation, once more, of the mighty truth which might 
 well be too hard for those who first heard it, to understand, since it is im- 
 perfectly realized after nineteen centuries ; that external rites aud formal 
 acts are of no value with God, in themselves ; that He looks at the con- 
 science alone ; that neither circumcision nor sacrifices, nor legal purifica- 
 tions, nor rigid observance of Sabbath laws, nor fasts, but the state of the 
 heart, determines the relation of man to God. 
 
 Before leaving the world, our Lord would put it beyond C{uestion that 
 His religion knew no caste or national privilege ; that it was independent 
 of the cumbrous machinery of rite and ceremony, which had crushed the 
 life out of the religion of the Old Testament; and that it could reign, in 
 its Divine perfection, in any human heart that opened itself to the spii'it 
 of God. 
 
 CHAPTER LIII. 
 
 IN PEllEA. 
 
 THE incident of the Sabbath meal, in the house of the Pharisee, had 
 occurred as Jesus was journeying by slow stages towards Jerusalem. 
 He had long ago felt that to go thither would ])C to die ; but His death, in 
 whatever part of the country He might Ijc apprehended, was already deter-
 
 570 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 mined by His enemies, and it was necessary for the future of His Kingdom 
 tliat He should not, like John, perish obscurely in some lonely fortress, 
 but with such publicity, and so directly by the hands of tlic upholders of 
 the old Theocracy, as to leave their deliberate rejection of His teaching in 
 no doubt, and to bring home to them the guilt of His death. 
 
 Yet He was in no hurry. It was still some time to the Passover, and 
 He advanced leisurely on His sad journey, through the different villages 
 and towns, teaching in the synagogues on the Sabbaths, and anywhere, 
 day by day, through the week. Meanwhile, the miracles Avhich He wrought 
 before continually increasing multitudes, excited in Herod, the local ruler, 
 the same fear of a political rising as had led him to imprison the Baptist. 
 
 In spite of our Lord's earnest effort to discourage excitement, by damp- 
 ing every worldly hope or ambition, in the crowds that followed Him, and 
 leaving no question of his utter refusal to carry out the national pro- 
 gramme of a ]5olitical Messiah, Herod was so alarmed that he made efforts 
 to apprehend Him. Had the throngs increased with His advance from 
 place to place, as they well might, so shortly before the Passover, He would 
 have entered Jerusalem with a whole army of partisans, and compromised 
 Himself at once \nt\i the Roman authorities. 
 
 He, therefore, spared no effort to discourage and turn back to their 
 homes those whom He saw attracted to Him from other than spiritual 
 motives. He wished none to follow Him who had not counted the cost of 
 doing so, and Iiad not realized His unprecedented demands from His dis- 
 ciples. Instead of courting popular support, now that His life was in such 
 danger. He raised these demands, and refused to receive followers on any 
 terms short of absolute self-surrender and self-sacrifice to His cause, though 
 Pie had nothing whatever to offer in return beyond the inward satisfaction 
 of conscience, and a reward in the future world, if the surrender had been 
 the absolutely sincere and disinterested expression of personal devotion 
 to Himself. 
 
 " Consider well," said He, " before you follow me farther. I desire no 
 one to do so who does not without reserve devote himself to me and my 
 cause. He must tear himself from all his former connections and associa- 
 tions, and offer up, as a willing sacrifice, the claims of father, mother, 
 wife, children, brother, or sister, and even his own life, if necessary, that 
 he may be in no way hindered from entire devotion to mo and my com- 
 mands. Short of this, no one can be my disciple. Nor can ho who is 
 not willing to bear shame and suffering for my sake. You cannot be my 
 disciples unless you are ready to be virtually condemned to die for being 
 so; imless, as it were, you already put on your shoulders the weiglit of the 
 cross on whicli you are to be nailed for confessing my name. 
 
 " It is, indeed, no light matter, but needs the gravest consideration. You 
 know how men weigh everything beforehand in affairs of cost or danger ; 
 much more is it needful to do so in this case. No man would bo so foolish 
 as to begin building a house without first finding out the cost, and seeing 
 if he can meet it. He will not lay the foundation, unless he be able to 
 finish the Avhole structure, for he knows that to do so would make him the 
 scoff of his neiglibours. Nor would any king or prince, at war with au
 
 IN PEEEA. 571 
 
 other, march out against him, witliout thinking whether he coiikl, witli 
 ten thousand men, overcome an enemy coming Avith twice as many. If ho 
 feel that the cliances are against him, he will seek to make peace hefore 
 his enemy come near, and will send an embassy to him to propose condi- 
 tions. No less, but rather much more, cai'cful consideration of the dangers 
 you run, of the greatness of my demands, of the losses j-ou must cndui'c, 
 of the shame and suffering certain to follow— arc needed before castiu" in 
 your lot with me. 
 
 " Yet, as I have repeatedly said before, it is the noblest of all callings to 
 be my disci[jle, if you really can accejit my conditions. For to hhu who is 
 truly my follower, it is given of God to keep alive and spread the spiritual 
 life of men, as salt keeps sound and fresh that which is seasoned by it. My 
 disciples are designed l)y God to be the spiritual salt of the earth. But if 
 the honour be greater, so much the greater is the responsibility ; for if a 
 follower of mine, thi'ough hankering after worldly interests, lose his spiri- 
 tual life and thus lose his power to further my cause, how can he hope to 
 regain it ? He is like salt that has lost its strength, and, as such worth- 
 less salt is cast out by men, so he will l^e cast out of God, from the king- 
 dom of the Messiah, at the great day. He who is thoughtful, let him 
 ponder of all this ! " 
 
 A great English writer has pictured an imaginary character as having 
 a sweet look of goodness, which drew out all that was best in others. 
 There must have been some such Divine attraction to the poor and outcast 
 in the looks and whole person of our Lord. India is nob more caste-ridden 
 than the Judca in which He lived. The aristocracy of religion regarded 
 the masses of their own nation with hatred and disdain, and all men of 
 foreign birth with bitterness still deeper. The ruin of long, disastrous 
 years of civil war and foreign domi7iation, had covered the land Avith 
 misery. The reign of the Herods had been a continued effort to rebuild 
 blamed towns, and restore exhausted finances ; but the Roman tax-gatherer 
 had followed, vampire-like, and had drained the nation of its life-blood, 
 till it was sinking, as all Koman provinces sank, sooner or later, into 
 general decay. In a land thus doubly adlicted Ijy social proscrijilion, and 
 by ever-increasing social distress — a land of mutual hatreds and wrongs — 
 the suffering multitudes hailed Avith instinctive enthusiasm one who, like 
 Jesus, ignored baleful prejudices ; taught even the sunken and hopeless to 
 regain self-respect, by showing that He, at least, still spoke kindly and 
 hopefully to them, in all their sinfulness and misery ; and l)y His looks 
 and words, no less than by His acts, seemed to beckon the unfortunate to 
 gather round Him as their friend. It must have spread far and wide, from 
 His first entrance on His ministry, that He had chosen a publican as one 
 of His inmost circle of disciples, and that He had not disdained to mingle 
 with the most forlorn and degraded of the nation, even in the frieiulliuess 
 of the table or the cottage. From many a Aviudowless hovel, Avhere the 
 smoke of the household fire made its way out only by the door, and the one 
 earth-floored apartment was shared by the wretched family, Avith the foAvls, 
 or even beasts they chanced to own — a hovel Avhich the priest or Ilabbi 
 would have died rather than defile himself by entering— the story spread
 
 572 THE LIFE OF CHIIIST. 
 
 how the great Galiloeau teacher had not only entered, but had done so to 
 raise the dying, and to bless the living. All over the land it ran from 
 mouth to mouth that, for the first time, a great Rabbi had appeared who 
 was no respecter of persons, but let Himself be anointed by a poor peni- 
 tent sinner, and sat in the booth with a hated jTOblican, and mingled freely 
 in the market-place with the crowds whose very neighbourhood others 
 counted pollution. Still more, it was felt by the jiroscribed millions, the 
 Cagots and Pariahs of a merciless theocracy, that He was their champion, 
 by the very fact that He was deemed an enemy by the dominant caste ; 
 for ojjposition to it was loyalty to them. 
 
 Hence, the midtitudes who, on this last journey especially, gathered 
 round Jesus with friendly sympathy and readiness to receive His instruc- 
 tions, were largely composed of the degraded and despised — the " publicans 
 and sinners " from far and near. The Eabbis enjoined that a teacher 
 should keep utterly aloof from such people, " even if he had the worthy 
 design of exhorting them to read the Law " — that is, even with the view 
 of reclaiming them. It was a sign that " wisdom did not dwell Avith one " 
 if he went near the thief or the usurer, even when they had turned from 
 their evil ways. The superstitious reverence demanded for those who 
 kept the Rabbinical laws strictly, was only equalled by the loathing felt 
 towards the ignorant commonalty. No Rabbi, or Rabbi's scholar, might 
 on any account marry a daughter of the Am-ha-aretzin, or unleai-ned, for 
 the gross multitude were an abomination, and their wives loathsome ver- 
 min ; and the most repulsive crime known to the Law was no worse thaii 
 to marry among them. No one might walk on a journey with a " common 
 man." It was sternly forbidden to pollute the Law by being seen to read 
 it before one. Their witness was refused in the Jewish courts, and it Avas 
 prohibited to give testimony in their favour ; no secret was to be told 
 them ; they could not be guardians of orphans, nor allowed to have charge 
 of the alms-box of the synagogue ; and if they lost anything, no notice 
 was to be given them of its having been found. 
 
 No wonder that the Rabbis, and the hierarchical party at large, owned 
 that " the hatred of the common people towards the ' wise ' was greater 
 than that of the heathen towards Israel, and that their wives were even 
 more fierce in their hatred of them than their husbands." 
 
 That Jesus should outrage the established laws of privilege and exclu- 
 siveness, by permitting those to follow Him whom Rabbis would not allow 
 to approach them, and, still worse, by receiving them kindly and eating 
 with them, was a bitter offence to the Pharisees and scribes. In their 
 ej'es, He was degrading Himself by consorting with the " unclean and 
 despicable." Nor could they say anything more fitted to excite the mortal 
 hatred of their class against Him. 
 
 The storm of bitter murmurings erelong reached the ears of our Lord, 
 and He at once seized the opportunity to define His position unmistakably, 
 and show that the course He took was in keeping with His whole aim. 
 
 " Let me ask you," said He, to some irritated Rabbis, who murmured at 
 seeing Him, on one occasion, surrounded by " publicans and sinners," " who 
 of you, if he had a flock of a hundred sheep, and one of them were to go
 
 IN TEREA. 573 
 
 astray, would not leave the ninety and nine on the pastures, and go off 
 after the one that was lost, till he found it ? And when he had done so, 
 would he not lay it on his shoulders gladly, and carry it back to the iloc-k ? 
 and, when he had come home, would he not call together his friends and 
 neighbours, to rejoice with him at his having found the sheep that was 
 lost? 
 
 " You scribes and Pharisees, Eabbis, lawyers, think you arc sorigliteous 
 that you need no repentance. Tou speak of some of your number as 
 having never committed a sin in their lives ; of some whose only sin has 
 been such a thing as having once put on the pli3-lactery for his forehead 
 before that for his arm ; and call some the ' pei-fectly rigliteous.' Let nie 
 tell you, that the great flock of God includes all mankind, for all are His 
 sons, and that when one who has gone astray and has lived in sin, comes 
 to himself and repents, there is greater joy in heaven over his return, than 
 over ninety and nine, who, like you, think they have no need of repentance. 
 And if this be the case in heaven, how much more ought I, here on earth, 
 to rejoice that many such penitent ones come to me, tlian at your self-suf- 
 ficient boasting that you need nothing at my hand .'' " 
 
 " Or," continued He, " T ask you, suppose a poor woman who had only 
 ten drachmae, were to lose one in any of the dark windowless hovels, in 
 which so many of our people in these evil days live, would she not light a 
 lamp and sweep the floor over, and spare no pains in seeking till she found 
 it ? And when she had found it, would she not call together her friends 
 and neiglibours, and ask them to rejoice witli her for having found the 
 drachma that was lost? In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in tlie 
 presence of the angels of God, in the highest heaven, over one such sinner 
 as those you so bitterly despise, who turns and repents. Well, therefore, 
 may I gladly receive them, and mingle with them, when they come to me 
 to learn the Avay back to God. 
 
 " Let me tell you a parable. 
 
 "A certain man had two sous. And the j'oungcr of these said to his 
 father, — ' Father, give me, I pi'ay you, the portion of the propei'ty that 
 falls to me. I am the younger son, and inherit only half as much as my 
 older brother, but I pray you let me have it.' The father, on this, divided 
 between the two all his living, retaining, however, in his hands till liis own 
 death, the larger share of the elder son as he might have done with that 
 of the younger sou also. His share, however, he gave into the joung 
 man's own hands. 
 
 " But before long, the younger son began to dislike the restraint of liis 
 father's house, and gatberiug all together, set off for a distant country, 
 and there gave his passions the reins, and lived in sucli riot, that Jiis wliole 
 means were very soon exhausted. But, now, when he had sjieut his all, a 
 great famine arose in the country, and he began to be in distress. At last 
 it went so hard with him, that he was glad to ask one of the citizens to 
 give him some employment, however liuml)lc, to get bread. He was, 
 thereupon, sent into the man's fields, to be his swineherd, a sadly shameful 
 occupation for a Jew ! Yet, after all, he did not as much as get the food 
 for which he had bargained, for neither his master nor any one else heeded
 
 574 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 liim, and he was left to stai've. He even lougcd to fill himself with the 
 pods of the carob-trec, eaten only by the very poorest, and mostly given 
 to swine, but no man gave him even these. 
 
 " In his loneliness and sore trouble, he began to reflect. ' How many 
 labourers and household servants of my father,' said he to himself, 'have 
 more bread than they can eat, while I, his son, am dying here of want ! 
 I will arise, and go back to my father, and will confess my guilt and un- 
 worthiness, and tell him how deeply I feel that I have sinned against 
 heaven and done great wrong towards him. I will say that I am no longer 
 worthy to be called his son, and will ask him to treat me like one of his 
 hired labourers, and tell him that I will gladly work with them for my 
 daily bread, so that he receive me again.' 
 
 " He had no sooner resolved to do this, than he rose to return to his 
 father's house. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, 
 and knew him, and ran out to meet him, full of loving compassion, and 
 fell on his neck and kissed him tenderly. And the son said to him, ' I 
 have sinned against God and against thee, and am not worthy that thou 
 shouldest any longer call me thy son.' He could not say what he had 
 intended besides, when he saw how fondly his father bent over him, not- 
 withstanding liis sins and folly. Nor was more needed; for his father 
 called out to his servants, ' Bring me out quickly the best robe, and put it 
 on him instead of his rags ; and put a ring on his finger, and sandals on 
 his feet; he shall no longer, like a slave, be without either; and bring tlie 
 fatted calf and kill it. We shall have a feast to-day and be merry, for my 
 son, lost and dead, as I thought, in a strange land, is once more home ; 
 dead by his sins, he is alive again by repentance ; a lost wanderer, he has 
 retiumed to the fold.' 
 
 " The elder son, meanwhile, had been in the field with the laljourers, but 
 now came towards home. And as he drew near, he heard music and 
 dancing. Calling one of the servants, he thereupon asked what had 
 happened, and was told that his brother had come home, and that his 
 father was so glad to have him once more safe and sound, that he had had 
 the best calf killed, and given for a feast to the household. 
 
 " But now, instead of rejoicing over his brother's return, the elder son 
 took amiss such gladness of his father, at having the wanderer safely back, 
 and would not go into the house or take any part in the rejoicings. The 
 father, therefore, ever kind and gentle, went out to him to soothe him, and 
 to beg Imn to come in. All he could say, hovrever, failed to soften his 
 heart, and he vented his discontent in angry reproaches : ' I have served 
 you for many a year, more like a slave than a son, and have obeyed you in 
 every particular, and yet you never gave me a kid, far less a fatted calf, 
 that I might have a little enjoyment with my friends. But when tliis 
 fellow, who is indeed your son, though I will not call him my brother^ 
 when this fellow who has spent your money on harlots — has come back 
 you have killed the fatted calf for him.' 
 
 " ' My son,' replied the father, mildly, ' have you forgotten that you have 
 been always by my side, while your brother has been far away from me, 
 or that all that T have belongs to you as my heir ? Surely all tliis should
 
 IN PEREA. 575 
 
 raise you above such hard judgments and jealous thoughts. What coukl 
 "we do but rejoice when a long-lost son has come back again to his father's 
 house ? ' " 
 
 The parables of the Lost Sheep and of the Lost Piece of Silver had 
 taught the same lesson as this, the noblest uttered by Christ. Henceforth, 
 for all ages, it was proclaimed beytjnd the possibility of misconception, 
 that the Eternal Father looks with unspeakably greater favour on the 
 penitent humility of " the sinner," with its earnest of gratitude and love, 
 than on cold self-righteous correctness in which the heart has no place. 
 
 We are indebted to St. Luke for some other fra^rmeuts of the teacluiii' 
 of these last weeks. 
 
 Among the great multitudes who had thronged after Him, the publicans 
 of the district were especially noticeable. Many of them were, doubtless, 
 in a good position in life, and some even rich, but all were exposed to 
 peculiar temptations in their hated calling. Not a few seemed to have 
 listened earnestly to the first Teacher who had ever treated them as men 
 with souls to save, and it was of the greatest importance to them that tliey 
 should have wise and true principles for their future guidance. The 
 following parable seems to have been delivered specially to them, as part 
 of an address when they had gathered in more than usual nimibers. 
 
 " A certain rich man had a steward, to whom he left the entire charge of 
 his affairs. He learned, however, from some sources, that this man was 
 acting dishonestly by him, and scattering his goods ; so he called him and 
 let hitn know what he had heard, telling him, at the same time, to make 
 out and settle all his accounts, as he could no longer hold his ofhcc. 
 
 " The steward, knowing that he was guilty, was at a loss Avliat to do. ' I 
 cannot dig,' said he, to himself, ' for I have not been accustomed to it, and 
 I am ashamed to beg.' At last he hit on a plan which he thought would 
 serve his end, and at once set himself to cany it out. Going to all his 
 master's tenants, one by one, he asked each how much rent or dues he had 
 to pay, though, in fact, he knew all this beforehand. When told, he pre- 
 tended to have been commissioned, in compliance with his own suggestion, to 
 lower the amount in each case ; and he thus secured the favour of all. For 
 esami^le, he went to one and asked him, ' How much owest thou to ]ny 
 lord?' and when told 'A hundred pipes of oil,' bade him take back bis 
 bill, and write another, instead, for fifty. A second, who owed a hundred 
 quarters of wheat, he told to make out a fresh writing with only eighty. 
 In this way, by leading them to think him their benefactor, he made sure 
 of friends, who woiild open their houses to him when he had Ijeen 
 dismissed. 
 
 " Some time after, when his master heard how cleverly he had secured 
 his own ends, he could not help admiring his shrewdness. And, in trutli, 
 it is a fact, that bad men like this steward— the sons of this world, not of 
 the next — are wiser in their dealings with their fellows, than the sons of 
 light, my disciples, are in theirs with their brethren, like themselves, sons 
 of my heavenly Kingdom. 
 
 "As the master of that steward commended him for his prudence, 
 though it was so worldly and selfish, I also must connnend to you a
 
 576 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 prudence of a higher kuid in your relations to the things of this life. By 
 becoming my disciples, you have identified yourselves with the interest 
 of {mother Master than Mammon, the god of this world, whom you have 
 hitherto served and have before you another course and aim in life. You 
 will be represented to your former master as no longer faithful to him, for 
 my service is so utterly opposed to that of Mammon that, if faithful to me 
 you cannot be faithful to him, and he will, in consequence, assuredlj^ take 
 your stewardship of this world's goods from you— that is, sink you in 
 poverty, as I have often said. I counsel you, therefore, so to use the goods 
 of Mammon — the worldly means still at your command — that, by a truly 
 worthy distril)ution of them to your needy Ijrethren, and my disciples are 
 mostly poor, you may make friends for yourselves, who, if they die before 
 you, will welcome you to everlasting habitations in heaven, Avhen you pass 
 thither, at death. Prepare yoiu-selves, by labours of love and deeds of true 
 charity, as my followers, to become fellow-citizens of the heavenly man- 
 sions with those whose wants you have relieved while they were still in life. 
 
 " If you be thus faithful in the use of your possessions on earth, you 
 will be deemed worthy by God to be entrusted with infinitely greater 
 riches hereafter, in heaven ; for he that is faithful in this lesser steward- 
 ship, has shown that he will be so in a higher, but he who has misused the 
 lesser, cannot hope to be entrusted with a greater. If you show, in your 
 life, that you have been unfaithful to God in the use of this world's goods, 
 entrusted to you by Him to administer for His glory, how can you liopc 
 that He will commit to your keeping the unspeakably grander trust of 
 heavenly riches ? If you have proved faithless in the stewardship of what 
 was not yours — the worldly means lent you for a time by God— how can 
 you hope to be honoured with the great trust of eternal salvation, which 
 would have been yours had you proved yourself fit for it ? 
 
 "Be assured that if you do not use your earthly riches faithfully for 
 God, by dispensing them as I have told you, you will never enter my 
 heavenly Kingdom at all. You will have shown that you are servants of 
 Mammon, and not the servants of God ; for it is impossible for any man 
 to serve two masters." 
 
 Such unworldly counsels, so contrary to their own spirit, were received 
 with contemptuous ridicule by the Pharisees standing round, as the mere 
 dreams of a crazed enthusiast. The love of money had becoine a charac- 
 teristic of their decaying religiousness, and it seemed to them the wildest 
 folly to advise the rich, as their truest wisdom, to use their wealth to 
 make friends for the future world, instead of enjoying it here. It is quite 
 possible, indeed, that some of them felt the words of Christ as a personal 
 reproof, and were all the more embittered. 
 
 Patient as He was in the endui-ance of personal wrongs and insults, the 
 indignation of Jesus was roused at such sneers at the first principles of 
 genuine religion, and He, at once, with the calm fearlessness habitual to 
 Him, exposed their hypocrisy and unsafeness as spiritual guides. 
 
 "You hold your heads high," said He, "and affect to be saints, before 
 men — such perfect patterns of piety, indeed, that you may judge all men 
 by yourselves.
 
 IN PEEEA. 577 
 
 " Yet God, who knows all things, and judges not by the outward ap- 
 pearance, but by the heart, knows how different you are in reality from 
 what you make men believe. Your pretended holiness, which is so highly 
 thought of by men, is an abomination before God. You ignore, or explain 
 away the commands of His Law when they do not suit j'ou, and thus are 
 mere actors ; for true godliness honours the whole Law. I condenni you 
 on the one ground on Avhich you claim to be most secure. You demand 
 honour for your strict obedience to the Law ; I charge you witli hyi^o- 
 crisy, for your designed and deliberate corruption of that Law to suit 
 yourselves. 
 
 " Sincerity is demanded from those who wish to serve God. That 
 which Moses and the Prophets so long announced — that to which all the 
 Scriptures point, the Kingdom of the Messiah — has come. From the 
 time when the Baptist preached, that kingdom is no longer future, but is 
 set up in your midst, and with what success ! Every one presses with 
 eagerness into it. But, as you know, I, its Head and King, make the 
 most searching demands from those who would enter it, and open its 
 citizenship only to those who are willing to overcome all difficulties to 
 obtain it. You charge me with breaking the Law : but, so far from doing 
 so, I require that the whole Law, in its truest sense, be obeyed by every 
 one who seeks to enter the New Kingdom. Believe me, it is easier for 
 heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tittle of the Law to lose its 
 force. But how different is it with you ! Take the one single case of 
 divorce. What loose examples does not the conduct of some of your own 
 class supply ? what conflicting opinions do you not give on the question ? 
 I claim that the words of the Law be observed to the letter, and maintain, 
 in opposition to your hollow morality, that any one who puts away his 
 wife, except for adultery, and marries another, himself commits adultery, 
 and that he who marries the woman thus divorced is also guilty of the 
 same crime. Judge by this whether you or I most honour the Law — 
 whether you or I are the safer guides of the people. How God must 
 despise your boasts of special zeal for His glory ! 
 
 " But that, notwithstanding your sneers, you may feel the truth of what 
 I have just said as to the results of the possession of riches, when they are 
 not employed as I have counselled — to make friends for yourselves, who 
 will welcome you to heaven hereafter — hearken to a parable. 
 
 "There was a certain rich man, who dressed in robes of fine purple— the 
 raiment of princes — over garments of the costliest Egyptian cotton, which 
 only the most luxurious can buy. 
 
 "There was also, in the same place, a poor diseased beggar named 
 Lazarus, who had been brought and set down, as an object of charity, 
 before the gates of the great man's mansion, where he lay helpless, day 
 after day ; so abject, that he longed to be fed with what fell from the rich 
 man's table. But the rich man, though he often saw him, and knew his 
 case, showed him no kindness, and instead of relieving the sufferer, and 
 thus making Avith his money a friend who should help him hereafter, as I 
 advise, had no thought except of himself, and of his own pleasure. The 
 poor man's case was indeed pitiful ; .he could not even drive away the 
 
 p p
 
 578 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 unclean dogs, which, day by day, came and increased his pain by licking 
 his sores. 
 
 "It came to pass, after a time, that Lazarus died, and was carried by 
 the angels to Paradise, and there laid down next to Abraham on the 
 banqueting conches, at the feast in the Kingdom of God, with his head 
 in tlie great patriarch's bosom — the highest place of honour that Paradise 
 could give. 
 
 " Soon after, the rich man, also, died, and, unlike Lazarus — whom men 
 had left uncared for, even in his death — he was honoured with a sump- 
 tuous funeral. 
 
 " Pie, also, passed to Hades ; not, however, to that part of it where Para- 
 dise is, but to Gehenna, the place of pain and torment in the world of 
 sliades. And in Hades he lifted up liis eyes, and saw Abraham in the far 
 distance, in the banqueting hall of bliss, with Lazarus reclining next him, 
 in his bosom, as bis most honoured friend. And he knew them both, and 
 remembered how Lazarus had lain at his gate, and thought of this as 
 a Ijond between them. ' O Father Abraham,' cried he, in his torments, 
 ' have mercy on my agony, I beseech thee, and send Lazarus, that he may 
 dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue, for I am tormented 
 in this flame.' So great had been the change in their positions, that the 
 despised beggar was now entreated to do even so small a favour to him 
 from Avhom he himself had once looked for any favour in vain ! Dives 
 would fain make friends with Lazarus, but could not bethink him of any 
 kindness he had ever shown him, to urge it on his own behalf. 
 
 " Of this Abraham now reminded him. ' Son,' said he, ' wonder not 
 that you and Lazarus are in such ojjposite conditions here, from those you 
 had when in life. You, then, had as much earthly hapjainess as you could 
 enjoy; you had it, and set your heart on it, and lived only for yourself. 
 Plad you used your v.'ealth as a godly man, in doing good to those who, 
 like Lazarus, needed pity, instead of lavishing it on splendour and self- 
 indulgence, you would have had good laid up for you now. But you lived 
 only fcr earth, and the good you cliose has been left behind you. You had 
 your portion in your lifetime, and have none here. But Lazai'us endured, 
 while still alive, the sufferings allotted him, and he has none in this state. 
 Penitent and lowly, he bore them patiently, as a child of God, and is now 
 receiving the reward of the poor in spirit. Plis position and yours are 
 reversed, for he finds consolation and joy in exchange for his earthly 
 misery, but you, pain and sorrow, instead of your self-indulgence.' 
 
 " ' Besides all this,' added ne, ' between this happy abode and yours, 
 there is a great space across which no one can pass, either from us to you, 
 or from you to us, so that it is inqjossible that you should have any share 
 in our joy, or that we can in any way lessen your pain.' 
 
 " Now, for the first time, the rich man saw the full extent of his misery, 
 and its cause. 'Would that I had acted differently,' cried he, ' when in 
 life. Would that, instead of living for myself — hard, impenitent, selfish — 
 I had been lowly and penitent, using my wealth as God enjoined, in Ijless- 
 ing the wretched. I should then have been welcomed by Lazarus, and 
 such as he, into the everlasting habitations of Paradise! '
 
 IN TEREA. 679 
 
 " * But, Father Abraham,' he continued, ' let me be the only one of my 
 race to come into this dolofiil place. Send Lazarus, I beseech tlicc, back 
 to earth, to my Father's house, for I have five brethren, who live as I 
 lived. It would add unspeakably to my pain if they also came to this 
 abode of woe. Oh ! let Lazarus go and warn them of what has befallen 
 me, their brother.' 
 
 " 'To escape your sad doom,' replied Abraham, 'they must needs repent, 
 and live the life of the godly. But for this the Law and the Prophets arc 
 the appointed means ; let them listen to them.' 
 
 '" Nay, Father Aln-aham,' answered the lost one, ' that is not enough. 
 It did not move me to repentance. But if a dead man returned again 
 from the grave, and came to them, and told them how it was with mo 
 here, they would be alarmed, and reform.' 
 
 " ' You err, my unhappy son,' said Abraham, closing the scene. ' It 
 would not move them in the least, for so amply are the Scriptures fitted 
 to persuade men to repentance, that those whom they do not w in to it 
 would not be persuaded even if one rose from the dead.' " 
 
 The Ealjbis had listened to the parable, but it touched their own failing 
 too pointedly, to make them cai'e for any longer conference with Jesus. 
 "When they were gone — it may bo while He was resting with the Twelve 
 in the cool of the evening — the incidents of the whole day were passed in 
 review, and Jesus noticed that the w^ords and bearing of His opponents, 
 respect for whom, as the teachers of the nation, was instinctive with every 
 Jew, had not been without their effect even on His disciples. It was evident 
 that the very nature of His demands, the trials and persecutions to come, 
 and the weakness of human nature, would raise moral hindrances to the 
 full and abiding loyalty of not a few. 
 
 By way of caution, therefore. He now warned them on this point. " It 
 is impossible," said He, "to prevent divisions, disputes, and even deser- 
 tion and apostasy, on the part of some of you, in the evil times to come- 
 Misrepresentation, prejudice, the bent of different minds, the weakness of 
 some, and the unworthiness of others, will inevitably produce their natural 
 results. The progress of my Kingdom will, I foresee, be hindered more 
 or less from this cause; but it cannot be avoided. Yet, woe to him who 
 thus hinders the spread and glory of the Truth. It were better for him, 
 if, like the worst criminal, he were bound to a heavy millstone, and cast 
 into the sea, than that he should cause a single simple child-like soul, who 
 believes in me, to stumble. Take heed that you neither mislead nor are 
 misled ! Remember my words— that offences must be prevented or re- 
 moved by a lowly forgiving spirit on your part. You know how far you 
 are yet from this ; how strong pride, love of your own opinion, harshness, 
 and impatience, still are in your hearts. To further my Kingdom when 
 I am gone, strive above all things for peace and love among yourselves. 
 
 "The one grand means of avoiding these causes of oifonce and spiritual 
 ruin, is unwearied, forgiving love ; that frame of mind which you see so 
 wholly wanting in the Rabbis, that they have even now murmured at my 
 so much as speaking to sinners, from whom such simple, lowly brethren 
 are to be rfathorod. Tf such an one sin against vou. and turn away from
 
 580 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 your fellowship, rebuke him for his siu ; but if he see his error and repent 
 of it, and come back, forgive him ; aye, even if he wrong you seven times 
 in a day, and feel and acknowledge his error, and promise amendment as 
 often, you must, each time, forgive him freely." 
 
 The Twelve had listened to these counsels with intense interest, but 
 their moral grandeur almost discouraged them. They felt that nothing is 
 harder than constant i^atience and loving humility^never returning evil 
 for evil, but ever ready to forgive, even when repeatedly injured without 
 cause. It needed, as they feared, stronger faith than they yet had, to 
 create such an abiding spirit of tender meekness. They had talked over 
 the whole matter, and saw only one source of strength. Coming to their 
 Master, full of confidence in His Divine power to grant their request, they 
 openly, and with a sweet humility, prayed Him that He would increase 
 their faith. 
 
 " This request," answered Jesus, " shows that faith, in a true and worthy 
 sense, is yet to be begun in your hearts. If you had it, even in a small 
 measure, or, to use a phrase you often hear, as a grain of mustard-seed; 
 instead of finding obedience to these counsels too difficult, you would 
 undertake and perform even apparent impossibilities — acts of trust which 
 demand the highest spiritual power and strength. In the words of the 
 Rabbis, familiar to you as an illustration of acts naturally impossible, you 
 would say to this sycamore or mulberry tree, ' Be thou plucked up by the 
 roots and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you — that is, you would 
 be able to do what, without divine help, is as much beyond human power. 
 
 " To such efficiency and eminence in my service will true faith in me 
 lead you ; but beware, amidst all, of any thought of merit of your own. 
 Your faith must grow, and cannot be given as a mere bounty from with- 
 out ; it is a result of your own spiritual development and true humility, 
 which looks away from self to me, as the one condition of this advance- 
 ment. You shall have the increased faith you seek, but it will be only by 
 your continued loving dependence on me, your Master. If any of you had 
 a servant ploughing or tending your flock, would you say to him, when he 
 comes home from the field in the evening, ' Come near immediately, and 
 sit down to meat ? ' Would you not rather say, ' Prejoare my supper, and 
 make yourself fit to wait on me at table, and after I have supped, you 
 shall eat and drink ? ' Would you think yourself under obligation to the 
 servant, because he has been working for you, or because he waits on you 
 as required ? Assuredly not, for, at most, he had only done what it was 
 right he should do as a servant. Be you such servants. There is a daily 
 woik, with prescribed tasks, required from you. The great supper will 
 not be till this life is ended ; but when it has come, you must not think of 
 yourselves, on account of your labours here, excej^t as becomes servants ; 
 and should you be rewarded or honoured, you must not forget, that it is 
 only from my free favour, not in paj^ment of any claim ; because, in fact, 
 you have done only what it was your duty, as servants, to do. The servant 
 who does less than his duty, is guilty before his master, but he who h^s 
 done his duty, though he has avoided blame, has no reason to think /lim- 
 self entitled to reward. In any case, therefore, your work has not been
 
 IN PEEEA. 581 
 
 beyond your rightful duty, and, tliough you have escaped condemnation, 
 you have no claim for any merit." 
 
 The hostility of the Rabbis was growing daily more bitter, after each 
 fruitless attack. At every town or village they gathered round Him, 
 and harassed Him by continual attempts to compromise Him with the 
 authoritier. 
 
 On one of these last days of His journey towards Jerusalem, a knot of 
 Pharisees had thus forced themselves on Him, and sought to elicit some- 
 thing that might serve them, by asking Him : 
 
 " Master, you have often represented yourself, both by word and by 
 mighty deeds, as the Messiah, but wc see no signs as yet of the coming of 
 the kingdom of God. When will it come ? It has been long promised." 
 
 "The kingdom of God," answered Jesus, "is somctliing entirely dif- 
 ferent from what you expect. You look for a great political revolution, 
 and the establishment of a Jewish empire, with its capital in Jerusalem. 
 Instead of this, it is a spiritual kingdom, in the hearts and consciences of 
 men, and, as such, cannot come with the outward display and circum- 
 stance of earthly monarchy, so that men may say, ' Lo, here is the kingdom 
 of God,' or, ' Lo, there.' The coming of the kingdom develops itself un- 
 (;bserved. I cannot, therefore, give you any moment when it may be said 
 to have come, for, in fact, it is already in j-our midst. I, the Messiah, live 
 and work amongst you, and where the Messiah is, there is His Kingdom. 
 There, already, is it steadily advancing, after its nature, like the seed in 
 the ground, like the grain of mustard-seed, or, like the leaven in a woman's 
 measure of meal." 
 
 The malevolent question thus met a reply which at once balked curiosity, 
 and laid the most solemn responsibilities on all ; for if the Messiah was 
 really among them, how imperative to fit themselves for entering His 
 Kingdom ! The interrogators, finding their sinister effort vain, presently 
 left, and, when alone, Jesus resumed the subject with His disciples. 
 
 "I have only spoken to these men," said He, "of the growth and de- 
 velopment of my Kingdom, unseen, and silently, in the hearts of men. To 
 you I would now speak of the future. Days will come when trouble shall 
 make men's hearts long for the return of one of the days of the Son of 
 man, and false Messiahs will rise, pretending to bring deliverance. But 
 when they say to you, ' Lo, there is the Messiah come at last,' or, ' Lo, here 
 He is,' go not out alter them ; do not follow them. For the coming of the 
 Son of man will be as sudden, as striking to all eyes, as mighty in its 
 power, as when the lightning leaps from the cloud and suddenly sets the 
 whole heavens in flame. There is no need of asking of the lightning 
 ' Where is it ? ' or for any to tell you of it. 
 
 " But this coming will not be now. I must first suffer many things 
 from this generation, and be rejected hj it. Instead of approaching with 
 slow royal pomp, seen and welcomed from afar ; instead of the world hail- 
 ing my coming, and preparing for it, as for that of an expected king; they 
 will be busied in their ordinary affairs when it is nearest ; till, suddenly, 
 wide ruin and judgment burst on them, as the flood on the men of the 
 days of Noah, and the fire from heaven on Sodom in the days of Lot,
 
 582 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 bringing destruction on all. Men lived in security then ; tliey ate and 
 drank, they married and gave in marriage, with no thought or prcjaaration 
 for the impending catastrophe. 
 
 " It will be the same at my coming. Men will be as secure ; the day 
 will burst on them as suddenly, when I shall be revealed in my glory. 
 When it comes, there Avill be an awful and instant separation of man f rotn 
 man. The good and evil will no longer be mixed together. He who 
 would save himself must, on the moment, part from those whom the peril 
 threatens. He who lives in a town, must, as the destruction approaches, 
 so hasten his flight, that if he be on the housetoiD when it draws near, he 
 must not think of going into the house to save anything, but must flee, at 
 the loss of all earthly possessions. He who is in the open field, must not 
 turn back to his house for his goods, but must leave all behind him, and 
 escape witli his life. You hear my words ; see you give heed to them in 
 that day. Eemember Lot's wife, who perished for looking back in dis- 
 obedience to the Divine command. Whosoever, in that day, shall seek to 
 preserve his life, by unfaithfulness to me, shall lose life eternal, and ho 
 who loses this life for my sake, will secure heaven for ever. 
 
 " The separation of men, at my coming, will, indeed, be solemn ! Those 
 who spent this life together, will then find themselves parted for ever ! I 
 tell you, in that night there will be two men in one bed ; one will be taken, 
 and the other left : two poor slaves will be grinding flour for the household 
 together ; one will be taken, and the other left." 
 
 The Twelve had listened with breathless attention to this vision of the 
 future. They had heard much that was new, grand, and fearful, and they 
 trembled with a natural alarm at the awful jjicturo set before them. 
 " Where, Lord," asked they, " will the Messiah gather His own, that they 
 may be safe? Where will those who love Thee find a refuge in that day?" 
 
 " Who tells the eagle," replied Jesus, " where the carcase is P His keen 
 eyes see it from afar. My faithful ones will at once discover where the 
 Messiah is, and where their gathering j)lace has been appointed, and with 
 swift flight will betake themselves thither." 
 
 The momentous earnestness with which Jesus had so often spoken of 
 the difficulty of being truly His disciple had sunk into the hearts of many 
 who heard it, and the free access to Himself He permitted, must often 
 have been used to seek counsel on a point so momentous. It was, more- 
 over, a passion with the Jew to speculate on eveiy question of theology, 
 as is seen in the vast system elaborated by the Kabbis. The mysteries of 
 the future world especially engrossed them. By the multitude it was taken 
 for granted that every Israelite would, of right, have a portion in heaven, 
 but there were not a few others who, like Esdras, fancied that " The Most 
 High had made this world for many, but the world to come for few : as He 
 had made much common earth, but little gold." One in whom His words 
 had raised such questions, took advantage, about this time, of His readiness 
 to listen to their doubts and inquiries, to ask Him if more than a few only 
 would be saved, since He had said it was so hard to be His follower. In- 
 stead of answering, directly, a question which could only gratify curiosity, 
 Jesus, ever practical, gave His reply a turn which was much more useful.
 
 IN PEEEA. 5S3 
 
 " It would benefit j'ou little," said He, " if I answered your question as 
 you wish; the great matter for yon is that many will not be saved, so that 
 it becomes you to strive, with intense earnestness, to enter in throngli the 
 narrow door that leads to eternal life ; for many, I say unto you, who would 
 like to enter at last, but do not thus strive now, will seek to do so when 
 too late, and will not be admitted. If once you be shut out from the 
 kingdom of the Messiah, you will in vain plead your present external con- 
 nection with me. When the great banquet of heaven begins, the Messiah 
 will cause the door of the banqueting hnll to be shut. If you, then, come 
 to it and knock at the door, saying ' Lord, open to us,' He will answer f n)m 
 within, ' I know you not, whence you are.' If you urge that He has for- 
 gotten you, and that, if He will bethink Him, He will recollect that you 
 ate and drank in His presence, as companions at the same taljlo, and that 
 He had taught in your streets. He will only answer, * I tell you 1 know you 
 not, whence ye are. Depart from me, all ye workers of unrighteousness.' 
 
 " What weeping and gnashing of teeth will be there as ye stand thus, 
 and see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the king- 
 dom of God, and yourselves cast out! What wailing, when you see, in- 
 stead of yourselves, the heathen you have so despised, come from the east, 
 and west, and north, and south, and sit down at the great feast of heaven. 
 Believe me, many who now, before the setting up of my Kingdom, are 
 first, will be last, after it is set up ; many, like the heathen, who shall 
 enter to the feast, though they have become my disciples only after Israel 
 has rejected my Kingdom, will yet take a first place in it. See that ye 
 press on while the door is still open to admit you."' 
 
 Jesus had now been for some time in Perea, in the territory of Antipas, 
 the murderer of John. The intense unpopularity of the crime had, doubt- 
 less, been a protection to Him; but, besides the fact that Antipas per- 
 sonally feared the great Miracle- worker, thinking He was perhaps the 
 murdered Baptist, risen from the dead, there were many other reasons 
 why he should wish Him fairly out of his dominions. Unwilling to appear 
 in the matter, he used the Pharisees, coimting on their readiness to fur- 
 ther his end. Some of their number, therefore, came to Christ, with the 
 air of friends anxious for His safety, and warned Him that it would be 
 well for Him to leave Perea as quickly as possible, as Herod desired to 
 kill Him. 
 
 Jesus at once saw through the whole design, as a crafty plan of Herod 
 for His expulsion. But He was on His way to Jerusalem, and contented 
 Himself with showing that He gave no grounds for political suspicion, 
 and that He quite well understood how little friendship there was in the 
 advice the Pharisees had given Him. 
 
 " Go and tell that crafty fox," said He, " that I know why he is afraid 
 of me, and wishes me out of his land. Tell him there is no cause for his 
 ill will, for I do nothing to wake his alarm. I have no designs that can 
 injure him, but confine myself to driving demons from poor men possessed 
 with them, and to healing the sick. These harmless labours I shall not in- 
 termit till the time I have fixed to give to them is over. It will take throe 
 days more to pass quite out of Perea, and for these three daj's I shall be
 
 584 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 in his territory, but on the third day I leave it, for I am now on my way 
 to Jerusalem, to die there. Herod will not need to trouble himself to kill 
 me, for it would be unfitting for a prophet to die outside the Holy City." 
 Such a message was virtually an intimation that He knew it would be by 
 the hands of those who pretended kindly to warn Him, and their allies, 
 that he should perish, and not by those of Antipas. 
 
 The word Jerusalem, and the thought of the guilt of the city so tenderly 
 loved hj Him — guilt soon to be increased by His violent death at its hand 
 — filled His heart with deep, irrepressible emotion. 
 
 " O Jerusalem ! Jerusalem," cried He, in a louder voice, trembling with 
 sadness, " it is thou, the City of the Temple, the City of the Great King, 
 who killest the prophets, and stonest those whom God sends unto thee ! 
 Thou art still true to thine evil repute ! How often, oh how often, thou 
 mother of many children, would I have gathered them all round me 
 safely, from the dangers before them, as the careful hen calls together 
 her brood, and spreads her wings over them, when the shadow of evil falls 
 near and guards them from every harm ! But thou wouldst not let me do 
 thee this service. For what shall come on thee thou must, thyself, bear 
 the blame ! The Divine protection I would have given thee thou hast 
 refused and hast lost, nor will I appear in thy desolation as thy helper. 
 Thou wilt not see me till I come to set up in thee my Kingdom, and receive 
 thy homage, no longer to be denied, as the Messiah, the Blessed, who comes 
 in the name of the Lord ! " 
 
 CHAPTER LIV. 
 
 IN VETH^ A— Continued. 
 
 THE lofty demands of Jesus from His followers had filled the Twelve 
 Avith doubts and misgivings of their power to fulfil them. A con- 
 tinuous self-denial which thought only of their Master, and a patient love 
 which returned meekness and good for evil and injury, were graces slowly 
 attained ; how much more so when they could only strike root in the heart 
 after the dislodgment of hereditary prejudices and modes of thought ? 
 
 A sense of weakness had already led them to ask that their faith in 
 Jesus as the Messiah, able to aid them in all their straits and trials, might 
 be strengthened. The utterance of that faith in prayer was no less neces- 
 sary, at once to obtain the grace needed to bear them through difficulties, 
 and to raise them to a steadfast confidence in the triumphant manifesta- 
 tion of their Master's Kingdom, of which He had more than once spoken. 
 Lest they should gi'ow slack in this great duty, He reminded thern that 
 their whole frame of mind should be one of habitual devotion, to keep 
 them from becoming faint-hearted, and giving way before the trials they 
 might have to suffer, or at the seeming delay in His coming. His words, 
 as usual, took the form of a parable. 
 
 "There was in a city," said He, "a judge who neither feared God nor 
 reverenced man. And there was also a widoAV in that city who had an 
 enemy from whom &he could hope to get free only by the interposition of
 
 IX PEREA. 685 
 
 the judge. So she came often to him, asking him to do justice to her, and 
 maintain her right against her adversary. But he paid no attention, for 
 a long time, to her suit. At last, however, he could bear her constant 
 coming no longer, and said within himself, ' Though I should do it as my 
 duty, that does not trouble me, for I do not pretend to fear God, and care 
 nothing for man ; yet this widow torments me. I shall therefore do what 
 is right in her case for my own sake, for otherwise she will weary me out 
 by her constant appeals.' 
 
 " So the widow, by her importunity, obtained licr end at last. 
 
 " Hear what the unjust judge says ! But if men thus get what is right, 
 even from the worst, if they urge their suit long enough, "with sufficient 
 earnestness ; how can any one doubt that God, the Righteous One, will 
 give heed to the cry of His saints for all they have to suffer ? AVill He 
 not much rather, — though He let the enemy rage for what seems a long 
 time, — surely, at the great day, avenge the wrongs of His elect who are so 
 dear to Him, and thus cry in prayer night and day ? 
 
 "I tell you, He will be patient towards them, though they thus cry to 
 Him continually, for He is not wearied with their complaints, as the un- 
 just judge was with those of the widow; and He will deliver them from 
 their enemies, without and within, and give them a portion in the King- 
 dom of the Messiah, and that speedily. For when the Messiah comes it 
 will seem as if the waiting for Him had only been brief. But when He 
 thus comes, will He find any who still look for Him and believe that the 
 promise of His return will be fulfilled ? "Will my disciples endure to the 
 end ; or can it be that they will fall away before all their trials ? " 
 
 To one of these last days in Perea we are indebted for the parable of 
 the Pharisee and the Publican. Jesus had spoken mucli of praj-er, but the 
 religion of the day was so lai'goly mechanical, that they were in danger 
 of mistaking the outward form for the substance. Only repeated lessons 
 could guard them from the lifeless formality of the Rabbis, with whom the 
 most sacred duties had sunk to cold outwai-d rites. Self-righteous pride, 
 moreover, was the characteristic of much of the current religiousness, 
 and was, in fact, a natural result of the externalism prevailing. To show 
 the true nature of devotion pleasing to God, He related the following 
 parable : — 
 
 "Two men," said He, "went up to the Temple to pray at the same time, 
 the hour of prayer. The one was a Pharisee, the other a Publican. The 
 Pharisee, who had seen the Publican enter the Temple with him, stood 
 apart, his eyes towards the Holy of Holies, and began to pray thus : ' 
 God, I thank Thee that I do not belong to the common multitude of man- 
 kind, whom Thou hast rejected — to the covetous, the unjust, the adul- 
 terous. I thank Thee that I am not what so many men are, what this 
 Publican here before Thee, is. He knows nothing of fasting or of tithes, 
 but I fast every Monday and every Thursday, and I give the priests and 
 Levites the tenth not only of all I have, but of all I may gain, which is 
 more than the Law requires.' 
 
 "The Publican meanwhile, feeling that he was a sinner, stopped far 
 behind the Pharisee, coming no farther into the sacred court than its very
 
 58G THE LirE OF cmusT. 
 
 edge : for he shrank from a near a] )p roach to God. Nor could ho dare, in 
 his lowly penitence, to lift up so much as his eyes to heaven, far less his 
 head and his hands, hut, with bent head, smote on his breast in his sorrow, 
 and said, ' God be merciful to me the sinner.' 
 
 " The Pharisee had offered only a proud, cold thanksgiving for his own 
 merits ; the Publican a humble cry for mercy. 
 
 " Believe me, this Publican, whom the Pharisee gave a place among the 
 extortionate, the unjust and the impure, received favour from God, and 
 returned to his home forgiven and accepted ; but the Pliarisec went away 
 unjustified. For, as I have often said, every one who thinks highly of 
 himself in religious things will be humbled before God, and he wlio 
 humbles himself will be honoured before Him." 
 
 Among the questions of the day fiercely debated between the great rival 
 schools of Hillel and Shammai, no one was more so than that of divorce. 
 The school of Hillel contended that a man had a right to divorce his wife 
 for any cause he might assign ; if it were no more than his having ceased 
 to love her, or his having seen one he liked better, or her having cooked a 
 dinner badly. The school of Shammai, on the contrary, held that divorce 
 could be issued only for the crime of adultery and offences against 
 chastity. If it were possible to get Jesus to pronounce in favour of either 
 school, the hostility of the other would be roused, and, hence, to broach 
 this subject for His opinion, seemed a favourable chance for compromising 
 Him. 
 
 Some of the Pharisees, therefore, took an opportunity of raising the 
 question. " Is it lawful," they asked, " to put away one's wife, when a 
 man thinks fit, for any cause he is pleased to assign ? Or, do you think 
 there are exceptions to this rule ? " 
 
 There could be no doubt that the lofty morality of Jesus would condemn 
 a mere human custom which was corrupting the whole civil and domestic 
 life of the nation, and undermining all honour, chastity, and love. Ho 
 had already answered the question fully, in the Sermon on the Mount, in 
 which He had taught that arbitrary divorce was not permitted ; but that 
 was long since, and He was now in a difTcrent part of the country. It was 
 quite in accordance with the habit of the day to appeal to any Kabbi on a 
 disputed religious question or scruple, on lighter or weightier points ; it 
 gratified the universal love for controversy, and gave an opportunity for 
 showing dialectical wit and sharpness. But the questioners gained little 
 by trying their skill on Jesus. 
 
 " Have you never read," answered He, " that the Creator of men made 
 man and woman at the same time, in the very beginning of our race, and 
 gave them to each other as husband and wife ? And do you not know 
 that so intimate was the relation tlius instituted, that close though the 
 connection l)e between parents and children, God has said that that be- 
 tween man and wife is so much closer, that a son, who, before, was under 
 his parents, and was bound more closely to them than to any other persons 
 in the world, is to separate himself from his father and mother when he 
 marries, and to form a still nearer relationship with his wife — such a 
 relationship that the two shall become, as it were, one. As soon as a man
 
 IN PEEEA. 587 
 
 and woman are married, therefore, the two make, together, ouly one bemg. 
 But since it is God who has joined them thus, divorce is the putting 
 asunder by man of what God has made into one. Marriage is a sacred 
 union, and man is not to regard it as something which he can undo at his 
 pleasure." 
 
 ISTothing could be said against this from natural grounds, but the objec- 
 tion lay ready that the Law of Moses was not so strict, and a prospect 
 offered of forcing Jesus either to contradict Himself, or to pronounce 
 openly against the great founder of the nation. " If this be so," said they, 
 " how comes it that Moses permitted a man to divorce liis wife ? for you 
 know that he says that writings of divorcement might be given where 
 a divorce was wished, and these dissolved the marriage." 
 
 " Moses," replied our Lord, " did, indeed, suffer you to put away your > 
 wives, to prevent a greater evil. He did so, as a statesman and a law- | 
 giver, from the necessities of the age, which made any better law imprac- I 
 ticable. Our fathers were too rude and headstrong to permit his doing 
 more. But, though he did not prohibit divorce, because the feelings of 
 the times did not allow him to do so, it does not follow from this that his 
 action in this matter was the original law of the Creator, or that conscience 
 and religion sanction such separations. I say, therefore, that whoever 
 puts away his wife, except for fornication — which destroys the veiy essence 
 of marriage by dissolving the oneness it had formed— and shall marry 
 another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is put away for 
 any other cause commits adultery, because the woman is still, in God's 
 sight, wife of him who has divorced her." 
 
 This statement was of far deeper moment that the mere silencing of l 
 malignant spies. It was designed to set forth for all ages the law of 
 His New Kingdom in the supreme matter of family life. It swept away 
 for ever from His Society the conception of woman as a mere toy or slave A 
 of man, and based true relations of the sexes on the eternal foundation of 
 truth, right, honour, and love. To ennoble the House and the Family, by 
 raising woman to her true position, was essential to the future stability of 
 His Kingdom, as one of purity and spiritual worth. By making marriage 
 indissoluble He proclaimed the equal rights of woman and man within the 
 limits of the family, and, in this, gave their charter of nobility to the 
 mothers of the world. For her nobler position in the Christian era, com- 
 pared with that granted her in antiquity, Avoman is indebted to Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 When an opportunity offered, the disciples asked fuller instruction 
 on a matter so grave. Customs or opinions, supported, apparently, by a 
 national law, and that law Divine— customs, the rightness of which has 
 never before been doubted— are hard to uproot, however good the grounds 
 on which they are challenged. Hence, even the Twelve felt the strictness 
 of the new law introduced by their Master respecting marriage, and frankly 
 told Him, that if a man were bound to his wife as He had said, it seemed 
 to them better not to marry, 
 
 " With respect to marrying or not marrying," replied Christ, " your say- 
 ing that it is good for a man not to do so is one which cannot be received
 
 588 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 by all men, but only by those to ■^^•llom the moral power to act on it has 
 been given by God. Some do not marry from natural causes, and there 
 are some who voluntarily keep in the single state, that they may give 
 themselves with an entire devotion to the service of my Kingdom. Let 
 him among you who feels able to act on the lofty principle of denying 
 himself the nobility and holiness of family life, that he may with more 
 entire devotion consecrate himself to my service, do so." Self-sacrifice, 
 in this, as in all things, was left by Jesus to the conscience and heart. 
 Even His apostles were left free to marry or remain single, as they chose, 
 nor can any depreciation of the married state be wrung from His wordsj 
 except by a manifest perversion of their spirit. 
 
 It is significant that in the South, as in Galilee, the mothers of house- 
 holds, though not expressly named, turned with peculiar tenderness and 
 reverence to the new Prophet and Rabbi. They were doubtless encouraged 
 to do so by the sight of the women who now, as always, accompanied Ilim 
 on His journeys ; but the goodness that beamed in His looks, and breathed 
 in His every word, drew them still more. Indifferent to the hard and 
 often worthless disputes and questions which engaged the other sex, they 
 sought only a blessing on the loved ones of their hearts and homes, con- 
 tented if Jesus would lay His hands on their infants, and utter over them 
 a word of blessing. 
 
 A beautiful custom led parents to bring their children at an early age 
 to the sjaiagogue, that they might have the prayers and blessings of the 
 elders. " After the father of the child," says the Talmud, " had laid his 
 hands on his child's head, he led him to the elders, one by one, and they 
 also blessed him, and prayed that he might grow up famous in the Law, 
 faithful in marriage, and abundant in good works." Children were thus 
 brought, also, to any Rabbi of special holiness, and hence they had been 
 presented already more than once before Jesus. Now, on this. His last 
 journey, little children were again brought to Him that He might put His 
 hands on them, and pray for a blessing on their future life. To the dis- 
 ciples, however, it seemed only troubling their Master, and they chid the 
 parents for bringing them. But the feeling of Christ to children was 
 very different from theirs. To look into their innocent artless eyes must 
 have been a relief after enduring those of spies and malignant enemies. 
 He Himself had the ideal childlike spirit, and He delighted to sec His 
 own image in little ones. Purity, truthfulness, simplicity, sincerity, 
 docility, and loving dependence, shone out on Him from them, and made 
 them at all times His favourite types for His followers. The Apostles 
 needed the lessons their characteristics impressed, and though He had 
 enforced them before. He gladly took every opportunity of repeating them. 
 
 " Let the little children come to me," said Jesus, " and do not forbid 
 them, for the Kingdom of Heaven is given only to such as have a childlike 
 spirit and nature like theirs." Instead of being too young for the bestowal 
 of His blessing, He saw in their simplicity and innocence the fond earnest 
 of the character he sought to reproduce in mankind. The citizens of His 
 Kingdom must become like them by change of heart and a lowly spiritual 
 life. Stooping down, therefore, He took them up in His arms, put His
 
 IN PEREA. 589 
 
 hands on them, and blessed them. Even the least incidents were thus ever 
 turned to the highest uses. 
 
 The need of this childlike spirit, and the sad results of its absence, must 
 have been brought home to the Apostles by an occurrence in their next 
 day's journey. Starting southwards, on the way to Jerusalem, a young 
 man, whose exemplary character had already made him a ruler of the local 
 synagogue, came running after Him, and, approaching Him with great 
 respect, kneeled before Him, as was usual before a venerated Eabbi. 
 " Teacher," said he, " I shall greatly thank Thee if Thou wilt ease my mind. 
 I have laboured diligently to do good works of all kinds prescribed by the 
 Law, but I do not feel satisfied that I have done enough ; I am not sure, 
 after all, that I shall inherit eternal life in the Kingdom of the Messiah. 
 Pray, tell me what special good work can I do to secure this." 
 
 '•' Why do you ask me what is right to do ? " answered Jesus. " Tour 
 question is superfluous, for it answers itself. There is only one Absolute 
 Good— that is, God. The good act respecting which you inquire can be 
 nothing else than perfect obedience to His holy will. If you really would 
 enter into life eternal, you must keep the Commandments given you by 
 Him." 
 
 The young man expected to hear some new and special commands, 
 requiring unwonted pains, and securing correspondingly great merit by 
 faultless obedience. The answer of Jesus was too general to help him in 
 this. He, therefore, asked, what commands Christ particularly meant. 
 
 To his astonishment and mortification, instead of naming some cere- 
 monial injunctions, as the Eabbis would have done, Jesus simply quoted 
 some of the well-known commandments of the Second Tal)le : " Thou 
 shalt not kill," " Thou shalt not commit adultery," " Thou shalt not steal," 
 " Thou shalfc not bear false witness," " Honour thy father and thy mother," 
 closing the list with the greatest of all : " Thou shalt love thy neighbour 
 as thyself," which was thus put last as the one by which He intended to 
 bring the young man to the test. 
 
 These were only the common duties required of all men, and, as such, 
 had a conventional fulfilment which satisfied human standards. Their 
 scope was very different, however, in the eyes of Jesus, and this the young 
 man presently felt. 
 
 His upright and honest life brought no blush at the enumeration. 
 Humbly, except for the secret pride of self -righteousness, and with all 
 reverent docility, he replied : 
 
 " I believe I can say that I have strictly kept all these commands. In 
 what respect do I still come short ? " 
 
 The question itself revealed his spiritual deficiencies. It showed that, 
 however sincere in his efforts after such a life as would secure heaven, he 
 had not risen above the outward service of the letter, and had realized 
 neither the spirit of the commandments as a whole, nor, in particular, the 
 infinite breadth of that which enjoined love to his neighbour. Had he 
 seen this in its true grandeur, it would have hinted a higher moral task 
 than merely legal conceptions of duty had taught him, and have supplied, 
 at the same time, an impulse towards its fulfilment
 
 590 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Jesus I'ead his heart in a moment, and was -won by the gnilclessnoss of 
 his answer and question, and by the evident wortli of his character. As 
 He looked at him, so earnest, so liumble, so admirable in his life and spirit, 
 He loved him. Could he only stand the testing demand that must now be 
 made, he would pass into the citizenship of the kingdom of God. 
 
 " You lack one thing yet," said Jesus, therefore, " if you really wish to 
 be perfect. Had you vmderstood the commands of God in their depth and 
 breadth, you would not have asked if you could do anything more than 
 you had done ; their living power in you would have suggested continually 
 fresli duties. When you ask me to tell you what next to do, it shows that 
 you think only of tasks imposed from without, and do not act from a 
 principle in your ov/n soul. If your desire for eternal life be supreme, as 
 it ought to be, go home, sell all that you have, and give what you get for 
 it to the poor, and instead of the earthl}' riches thus given in charity, yon 
 Avill have treasure in heaven. Tlien, come to me, be my disciple, and Ijear 
 your cross after me, as I bear mine." 
 
 The demand, great though it seems, was exactly suited to the particular 
 case. It was a special test in a special instance, tliough underneath it lay 
 the unconditional self-sacrifice and self-surrender for Christ, required from 
 all His disciples. It could not fail to bring the young man to a clearer 
 self-knowledge, and thus, to a wholly new conception of what true religion 
 demanded. The only way to lead him to a healthier moral state was to 
 humble him, by a disclosure of weakness hitherto unsusjoected. He had 
 fancied himself willing to do whatever could be required; he could now 
 see if he really were so. He had thought he cared for nothing in com- 
 parison with gaining heaven; he could now judge for himself if ho had 
 not erred. 
 
 It might have been hoped that this lofty counsel, the repetition of that 
 which had been so often given to others before, would have roused one so 
 earnest to a noble enthusiasm, before which all lower thoughts would have 
 lost their jDOwer. The love he had ins])ired in Jesus must have shown 
 itself towards him in every look and tone ; there must have been every 
 desire to attract and win, none to repel. But the one absolute, constant 
 condition of acceptance demanded from all — supreme, unrestricted devo- 
 tion to Himself and His cause, and willingness to sacrifice all human ties 
 and possessions, or even life, for His sake— could in no case be lowered. 
 Poor, friendless, outlawed, Jesus abated no jot of His awful claims, loftier 
 than human monarch had ever dreamed of makinc^, on all who sonofht 
 citizenship in His Kingdom. 
 
 The test exacted was fatal, at least for the time. It was precisely thai 
 which the young man had least expected, and was a thousand times harder 
 than any legal enforcements; painful and protracted even as those by 
 which the highest grade of ceremonial holiness was attained. Had Jesus 
 invited him to be His disciple without requiring the condition He had so 
 often declared indispensable, there would have been instant, delighted 
 acceptance. But that could not be. He could not say " Be my disciple," 
 till He had secured his supreme devotion. 
 
 Kich, and already a magistrate— for Church and State with the Jews
 
 IN PEREA. 591 
 
 were identical — tlie demand staggered and overwhelmed the young man. 
 A moment's thought, and his broad acres and social position, which he 
 must give up for ever if he would follow Jesus, raised a whole army of 
 hindrances and hesitations. The condition imposed had no limitation, but 
 neither had his own question to which it was a reply. He had been 
 touched where weakest, but this was exactly what his repeated request 
 demanded. Why should Jesus have asked less from him than from other 
 disciples ? It was, doubtless, harder for a rich than for a poor man to 
 leave all, but there must, in no case, be room for doubt of the entire sin- 
 cerity of those admitted as disciples, and this could be tested only by their 
 readiness to sacrifice all to become so. It was less, besides, to demand 
 this, as things were, for discipleship would only too surely involve, very 
 soon, not only loss of all earthly goods, but life-long trials, and even death. 
 
 But the world got the better in the young man's heart, and he went away 
 sorrowful, at the thought that he was voluntarily excluding him.self from 
 the Kingdom of the Messiah. Yet, the wide fields, the rich possessions— 
 how could he give them up ? 
 
 " How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of 
 God!" said Jesus, as the candidate for discipleship went away, evidently 
 in great mental distress. "It is easier," continued He, "to use a proverb 
 you often hear, for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a 
 rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." 
 
 The words fell with a new and perplexing sound on the oars of the 
 apostles. Like all Jews, they had been accustomed to regard worldly 
 prosperity as a special mark of the favour of God— for their ancient Scrip- 
 tures seemed always to connect the enjoyment of temporal blessings with 
 obedience to the Divine law. They still, moreover, secretly cherished the 
 hope of an earthly kingdom of the Messiah, in which liches would be 
 showered on His favourites, and, even apart from all this, if it were hard 
 to enter this " Kingdom of Heaven," except by stooping to absolute 
 poverty, it seemed as if very few could be saved at all. 
 
 "' Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the 
 Kingdom of God," repeated Jesus, seeing their wonder and evident uneasi^ 
 ness. " It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for 
 a rich man, who clings to his riches, to enter into the kingdom of God." 
 
 " Who, then, can be saved ? " asked some of them. 
 
 " With men it is impossible," replied Jesus, fixing His eyes earnestly on 
 them, "but not with God; for with God all things ai'e possible. He can 
 bestow heavenly grace to wean the heart from worldly riches ; apart from 
 this, the world will prevail." 
 
 Peter, especially, had listened with deep attention to all that had passed, 
 and had been mentally applying it to the case of his fellow-disciples and 
 himself. Their minds were still full of the Jewish idea of merit before 
 God, and of a claim to corresponding reward. When Jesus summoned 
 them to follow Him, they had been exactly in the young man's position, 
 though they had not had so much to surrender. They had given up every- 
 thing for Him, at His first invitation — their families, houses, occupations, 
 and prospects. However little in themselves, these had been the whole
 
 592 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 world to them. It seemed only natural, therefore, that they should have 
 a proportion of that treasure which Jesus had promised the young man, if 
 he forsook all for His sake. 
 
 In kcejiing with his natural frank impulsiveness, Peter could not restrain 
 his thoughts, and asked Jesus directly what he and his fellow- Apostles 
 would have for their loyalty to Him ? 
 
 Knowing the honest simplicity of the Twelve, their Master, instead 
 of reiDroving their boldness, cheered them with words which must have 
 sounded inconceivably grand to Galilaean fishermen. 
 
 " Be assured that at the final triumph of my Kingdom, when all things 
 shall be delivered from their present corruption, and restored, through me 
 and my work, to the glory they had before sin entered the world ; when I, 
 the now despised Son of man, shall come again, seated on the throne of 
 my glory, you who have followed me in my humiliation, will be exalted to 
 kingly dignity, and shall sit, each of you, on his throne, to judge the 
 twelve tribes of Israel. Yea, more; every one who gives up his brethren, 
 or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or lands, or houses, that he 
 may the more unreservedly sjjread my Gospel and honour my name, will 
 be rewarded a hundredfold. Even in this present life he will receive back 
 again richly all he has left — houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothersi 
 and children ; for he will find among those who believe in me, a compen- 
 sation for all ; he will regard and be allowed freely to use their means as 
 his own, and be welcomed by them with more than brotherly friendship. 
 But, with all this, he will have to bear persecution. In the future world, 
 moreover, he will have a still greater reward, for there he will inherit 
 everlasting life. 
 
 " But," added He, by way of warning, " do not trust to your having 
 been the first to follow me. For the rewards of the kingdom of heaven 
 will be like those given by a householder who had a vineyard, and, needing 
 labourers for it, went out eai'ly in the morning to hire them. Having 
 found some, he agreed to give them a denarius a day, and sent them into 
 the vineyard. Going out again about the third hour — nine o'clock — he 
 saw others standing idle in the market-place, and sent them also into the 
 vineyard, making no bargain with them, however, but bidding them trust 
 him that he Avould give them what was just. He did the same at the sixth 
 and at the ninth hours. Finally, he went out at the eleventh hour, and 
 found still others standing about, and asked why they had stayed there all 
 the day, idle. ' Because no one has hired us,' replied they. ' Go ye also 
 into the vineyard,' said he, ' and you shall receive whatever is right.' 
 
 " When the evening was come, the lord of the vineyard bade his overseer 
 call the labourers, and pay them all the same sum — the denarius, for which 
 he had agreed with the first. He was also to begin with those who came 
 into the vineyard last. 
 
 " When they came, therefore, who were hired at the eleventh hour, they 
 received each a denarius. But when the first came, they supposed they 
 should have received more ; but they also received, each, only the same 
 amount. And when they received it, they murmured against the house- 
 holder, saying, ' Those who came in last did only one hour's work, and
 
 IN PEREA. 593 
 
 thou hasfc made them equal to us, wlio bore the scorching wind from the 
 desert at sunrise, and the heat of the day.' But he answered one of them, 
 ' Friend, I do thee no wrong ; didst not thou agree w'ith me for a denarius ? 
 Take what is yours, and go ; I desire to give the same to those who came 
 in last, as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will in my own 
 affairs ? Is thine eye evil because I am good ? ' 
 
 •' The householder thus made the first last, and the last first, because 
 the first had been working for hire, while the others had simply trusted 
 his promise. He who works in my kingdom for the sake of a reward here- 
 after, may do his work well, but he honours me less than others who trust 
 in me without thinking of future gain. The spirit in which you labour 
 for mo gives your service its value. He who is called late in life, and 
 serves me unselfishly, will stand higher at the great day than he who has 
 served me longer, but with a less noble motive. Many are called to join 
 my kingdom and work in it, but few show themselves especially worthy 
 of honour by their spirit and zeal. If the first find themselves last, it will 
 be their own fault ; for though no one can claim reward as his due in the 
 Kingdom of God, yet I give it, of favour, to those first who serve me most 
 purely. He, I repeat, who works most devotedly, without thought of 
 reward, will be first, though, perhaps, last to be called ; he will be chosen 
 to honour, while others, less zealous and loving, though earlier called, will 
 remain imdistiaguished." 
 
 Nothing could have been more fitted to check any tendency to self- 
 importance and pride, so natural in men raised to a jjosition so incon- 
 ceivably above their original station. ISTor was there room, henceforth, 
 for any mercenary thoughts, even of future reward, for the discharge of 
 their duty. They could not forget, that, though first to enter the vineyard 
 of the New Kingdom, they were yet, so far, on a footing with all v/ho 
 should follow them, that the spiritual worth of their work alone determined 
 their ultimate honour. The special reward promised by their Master was 
 a free gift of God, not the payment of a debt, and depended on their own 
 spirit and zeal. 
 
 They were now approaching the end of their journey, for they were near 
 Jericho, at which the road struck directly west to Jerusalem. Nisan, the 
 month of the Passover, had already come, and only a few days more 
 remained of our Saviour's life. Nature was putting on its spring beauty, 
 and throngs of early pilgrims were passing to the Holy City. All around 
 was joy and gladness, bn.t, nevertheless, a deep gloom hung over the little 
 company of Jesus. Everything on the way — the constant disputes with 
 the Rabbis, the warning about Antipas, the very solemnity of the recent 
 teachings — combined to fill their minds with an undefined terror. They 
 had shrunk from visiting Bethany, because it was near Jerusalem ; for 
 they knew that the authorities were on the watch to arrest their Master, 
 and put Him to death. He had had to flee from that village, first to 
 Ephraim, and then, over the Jordan, to Perea, and yet He was now de- 
 libei'ately walking ini^ the very jaws of danger. They had marched 
 steadily southwards tlirough the woody highlands of Gilead ; they had 
 passed the rushing waters of the Jal^bok and its tributaries, and seen, for 
 
 Q Q
 
 5U4 TUE LIFE or ClilUST. 
 
 a moment, once more, the spot where Jolm had closed his mission. The 
 distant mountains of Machaerns now threw their shadows over tlieir route, 
 and, everywhere, the recollections of the great herald of their Master met 
 them. Mount ISTebo, where Moses was buried, and the range of Attaroth, 
 where John's mutilated corpse had been laid to rest, were within sight. 
 Everything in the associations of the journey was solemn, and they knew 
 their national history too well not to fear that, for Jesus to enter Jeru- 
 salem, would be to share the sad fate of the prophets of old, whom it had 
 received only to murder. It was clear that there could be but one issue, 
 and no less so that He Avas voluntarily going to His death. The calm 
 resolution with which He thus carried out His purpose awed them ; for, 
 so far from showing hesitation. He walked at their head, while they could 
 only follow with excited alarm. 
 
 Yet, their ideas were sadly confused, and the hope that things might 
 result very differently alternated with their fears. The old dream of an 
 earthly kingdom still clung to them, and they fancied that, though Jesus 
 might ex]oect to be killed in the national rising which He would, perhaps, 
 bring about at the approaching feast. He might be more fortunate, and 
 live to establish a great Messianic monarchy. 
 
 To dissipate such an illusion. He had already told them, twice, exactly 
 what was before Him ; but to prepare them, if possible, for the shock 
 which the sad realization of His words was so soon to bring. He once 
 more recapitulated, with greater minuteness than ever, Ayhat He knew, 
 with Divine certainty, awaited His entrance into Jerusalem. 
 
 " Behold," said He, " we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of man 
 will bo delivered to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn 
 Him to death " — they, and no others ; for, as heads of the Old Kingdom 
 of God, now coi'rupt and dying, they had rejected Him — "and they will 
 deliver Him to the Eomans, to mock, and scourge, and crucify, but the 
 third day He shall rise again." 
 
 How hard it is to uproot strong prepossessions was shown within a fevr 
 hours. In spite of such repeated warnings, not only the Twelve, but the 
 others who followed Him, did not understand what He meant. It is easj^ 
 for us to do so, after the event ; but to anticipate the explanation thus 
 given must have been well-nigh impossible to minds pre-occupied with 
 ideas so radically opposed to it. 
 
 The mention of thrones, as in reversion for the Twelve at " the Coming " 
 of their Master in His glory, had neutralized the announcement of His 
 death. His open triumph was expected as very near at hand ; His death 
 they did not understand, and could not reconcile with His other state- 
 ments, for, indeed, they did not wish to do so. 
 
 Dreams of ambition, thus kindled, had risen, especially in the minds 
 of James and John, who, with Peter, were the most honoured of the 
 Apostles. They had been in a better social position than many of their 
 brethren, and, with Salome, their mother, had freely given all they had, 
 to the cause of their Master. Ashamed to tell Him their thoughts 
 directly, they availed themselves of Salome, whom, perhaps. He might 
 the more readily hear, as older than they ; as a woman ; perhaps as Ilis
 
 IN PEREA. . 595 
 
 mother's sister, and as one who had shoAvn herself, hkc her sons, His true 
 friend. 
 
 She now came, therefore, with them, in secret, and, falling on her knees, 
 as was the custom where reverence was intended, and as was especially 
 due to one whom she regarded as the future great Messianic King, told 
 Him she was about to ask a surpassing favour. " What is it ? " asked 
 Jesus. " Say," answered she, " that these, my two sons, may sit, like the 
 chief ministers of other kings, at Thy feet, on Thy right hand and Thy 
 left, on the first step of the throne, when Thou settest up the Kingdom." 
 
 So different, as yet, were the two from what they were afterwards to 
 become, when they had drunk more deeply of their Master's spirit ! 
 
 " You do not understand what your request implies," answered Jesus. 
 "The highest place in my Kingdom can only be gained by drinking the 
 cup of sore trial, of which I, myself, shall drink presently, and enduring 
 the same fierce baj^tism of sorrow and suffering, even to death, in which 
 I am to be plunged. Do you think you are able to bear all that ? " 
 
 In simple true-heartedness, both answered, at once, that they were. 
 
 "You shall, indeed," replied Jesus, "drink of my cup, and be baptized 
 with the same baptism as I ; but, in my Kingdom, no honours can be given 
 from mere favour, as in kingdoms of the world. They can be obtained 
 only by those fitted for them by spiritiial greatness. The one way to 
 secure them is through supreme self-sacrifice for my sake, and they are 
 given by my Father to those alone who thus show themselves worthy. 
 For such, indeed, they are prepared by Him already." 
 
 John and James had striven to hide their selfish and ambitious request, 
 by coming to Jesus when He was alone, but the Ten, as was inevitable 
 soon heard of it, and were indignant in the extreme at such an unworthy 
 attempt to forestall them in their Master's favour. Their own ambition, 
 at best only suppressed, broke out, afresh, in a fierce storm of jealous 
 passion. Such human weakness was sadly out of place at any time, 
 among the followers of the meek and lowly Son of man, but still more so, 
 novf, when He stood almost under the shadow of the cross, and it must 
 have caused Him the keenest sorrow. Calling round Him, therefore, the 
 whole Twelve, offenders and oiiended. He pointed out how utterly they 
 liad misapprehended the nature of His Kingdom, notwithstanding all His 
 teaching through the past years. 
 
 " You are disputing about precedence in my Kingdom," said He, " as if 
 it were like the kingdoms of the world. Once more, let me warn you that 
 it is wholly different. The kings of the heathen nations around us lord 
 it over their subjects, and their magnates, under them, exercise authority 
 often more imperiously than their chiefs. But it is very different in my 
 Kingdom, and a very different spirit must find place among you, its digni- 
 taries. He who wishes to be great in that Kingdom can only be so by 
 becoming the servant of the others ; and he who wishes the very highest 
 rank, can only be so by becoming their slave. You may see that it must 
 be so from my own case, your King and Head— for I, the Son of man, came 
 not to be ministered unto, as other khigs are, but to serve, and to give up 
 even my life as a ransom for many."
 
 596 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 The upland pastures of Perea were now behind them, and the road led 
 down to the sunken channel of the Jordan, and the " divine district " of 
 Jericho. This small but rich plain was the most luxuriant spot in Palestine. 
 Sloping gently upwards from the level of the Dead Sea, 1,350 feet below 
 the Mediterranean, to the stern background of the hills of Quarantana, 
 it had the climate of Lower Egypt, and displayed the vegetation of the 
 tropics. Its fig-trees were pre-eminently famous ; it was unique in its 
 groves of palms of various kinds ; its crops of dates were a proverb ; the 
 balsam-plant, which grew principally here, f nrnished a costly pcrf nmc, and 
 was in great repute for healing wounds ; maize yielded a double harvest ; 
 wheat ripened a whole month earlier than in Galilee, and iTinumerable bees 
 foiind a paradise in the many aromatic flowers and jilants, not a few 
 unknown elsewhere, which filled the air with odours and the landscape 
 with beaut3^ 
 
 Eising like an amphitheatre from amidst this luxuriant scene, lay Jencho, 
 the chief place east of Jerusalem, on swelling slopes, seven or eight miles 
 distance from the Jordan, and seven hundred feet above the river, bed, 
 from which its gardens and groves, thickly interspersed with mansions, 
 and covering seventy furlongs from north to south, and twenty from east 
 to west, were divided by a strip of wilderness. The toAvn had had an 
 eventful history. Once the stronghold of the Canaanitcs, it was still, in 
 the days of Christ, surrounded by towers and castles. Thrax and Taurus, 
 two of them, at the entrance of the city, lay in ruins since the time of 
 Pompey, but the old citadel Dock, towered aloft — dark with the recollec- 
 tion that its heroic builder, Simon Maccabajus, and his two sons, had been 
 murdered in its chambers. Kypros, the last fortress built by Herod the 
 Great, who had called it after his mother, rose Avhite in the sun on the 
 south of the town. The palace of the Asmonean kings stood amidst 
 gardens, but it had been deserted by royalty since the evil genius of her 
 house, Alexandra, the mother-in-law of Herod, and mother of Mariarane, 
 had lived in it. The great palace of Herod, in the far-famed groves of 
 palms, had been plundered and burned down in the tumults that followed 
 his death, but in its place a grander structure, built by Archclaus, had 
 risen amidst even finer gardens, and more copious and delightful streams. 
 A great theatre and spacious circus, built by Herod, scandalized the Jews, 
 not less by their unholy amusements than by the remembrance that the 
 elders of the nation had been shut up in the latter by the dying tyrant, to 
 be cut down at his death, in revenge for the hatred borne him. Nor was 
 the murder of the young Asmonean, Aristobulus, in the great pools which 
 suiToundcd the old Asmonean pal-ace, forgotten; nor the time when Cleo- 
 patra had wrung the rich oasis from the hands of Herod, by her spell 
 over her lover, Antony. A great stone aqueduct of eleven arches brought 
 a copious supply of water to the city, and the Eoman military road ran 
 through it. The houses themselves, however, though showy, were not 
 substantial, but were built mostly of sun-dried brick, like those of Egypt ; 
 so that now, as in the similar cases of Babylon, Nineveh, or Egypt, after 
 long desolation hardly a trace of them remains. 
 
 A great multitude accompanied Jesus as He drew near Jericho — pil-
 
 IN PEREA. 5'J7 
 
 grims, on foot, or on asses, or camels— who had coiue from all the side 
 passes and cross roads of Perea and Galilee. They met at this central 
 point to go up to the Passover, at Jerusalem ; not a few with an eye to 
 the trade with foreign j^ilgrims, driven so briskly in the Holy City at this 
 season, as well as for devotion. 
 
 ISTear the gate of the town one of the last miracles of our Lord was 
 jjerformed. Like the Temple itself, all the roads leading to Jerusalem 
 were much frequented at the times of the feasts, by beggars, who reaped 
 a special harvest from the charity of the pilgrims. 
 
 Blindness is remarkably frequent in the East. While in northern 
 Europe only one in a thousand is blind, in Egypt there is one in every 
 hundred ; indeed, very few persons there have their eyes quite health}'. 
 The great changes of temperature at different times of the day, especially 
 between day and night, cause inflammation of the eyes, as well as of other 
 parts, both in Palestine and on the Lower Nile ; while neglect and stupid 
 prejudice, refusing or slighting remedies in the earlier stages, lead to 
 blindness in many cases that otherwise might have been easily cured. 
 
 Among the beggars who had gathered on the sides of the road at Jericho 
 were two who had thus lost their sight : one of whom only, by name 
 Bar-TimjBus, for some special reason, is particularly noticed by two of the 
 Gospels, in the incident that followed. 
 
 They had probably heard of the cure, at Jerusalem, of the man who had 
 been born blind, and learning now from the crowd that the great wonder- 
 worker was passing by, at once appealed to Him as the Son of David — • 
 the Messiah — to have mercy on them. The multitude tried in vain to 
 silence them : they only cried the louder. At last, Jesus came near, and, 
 standing still, commanded them to be brought. Li a moment their upper 
 garment, which would have hindered them, was cast aside, and, leaping 
 up, they stood before Him with their artless tale ; that they believed 
 He could open their eyes, and they prayed He would do so. A touch 
 sufficed : immediately their eyes received sight again, aiid they joined in 
 the throng that followed their Healer. 
 
 Jericho was a Levitical city, and hence the residence of a great many 
 priests ; its position as the centre of an exceptionally piolnctive disti'ict, 
 and also of the import and export trade between the two sides of the 
 Jordan, made it, also, a city of publicans. It had much the same place 
 in Southern Palestine as that held in Galilee by Capernaum, the centre 
 of the trade between the sea-coast and the northern interior, as far as 
 Damascus. The transit to and fro of so much wealth brought with it 
 proportionate work and harvest for the farmers of the revenue. Hence, 
 a strong force of customs and excise collectors was stationed in it, under 
 a local head, named Zacchosus, whom, in our day, we might have called a 
 commissioner of customs. Li a sj^stem so oppressive and arbitrary as the 
 Bomau taxation, the inhabitants must have suffered heavily at the hands 
 of such a complete organization. To be friendly with any of their number 
 was not the way to secure the favour of the people at large. 
 
 Zacchffius, especially, was disliked and despised, for, though a Jew, he 
 had grown rich by an infamous profession, and was, in the eyes of his
 
 598 THE LIFE OF CIIRTST. 
 
 fellow-townsmen, not only an extortioner, but, by his serving the Romans, 
 a traitor to his race, and to their invisible King, Jehovah. His personal 
 cliaractcr, moreover, seems to have been bad, for he owned to Jesus that 
 he had, at least in some cases, wrung money from his fellow-townsmen by 
 swearing falsely against them before the magistrates.* 
 
 Jesus had seldom passed that way, and hence His person was little 
 kuovra, though report had spread His name widely. Among others, Zac- 
 chasus was anxious to see Him, and, being a little man, he had run before 
 the caravan with v.diich our Lord was entering the town, and had taken 
 his station in one of the ever-green fig-trees — a sycamore — of which some 
 grew at the wayside, of great size, a few even fifty feet in circumference. 
 They were easy to climb, from their short trunks, and wide branches 
 forkinff out in all directions. 
 
 He had never seen Jesus ; and having no idea that he was known to 
 Him, must have been astounded when the Great Teacher, as He passed the 
 spot, looked up, and, addressing him by name, told him to make haste and 
 come down, as He intended to be his guest that night. A Divine purpose 
 of mercy, as yet known to Jesus alone, had determined this self-invitation. 
 Though all others shunned the chief of the publicans as specially disre- 
 putable, he was chosen in loving pity by Jesus, as His host. The word was 
 enough ; in an instant he was in the road, and pressingly welcomed Christ 
 to his hospitality. That he, the hated and despised one, should have been 
 thus favoured, in a moment won his heart, and waked the impulse of a 
 new and better life ; but it also raised the hostile feeling of the multi- 
 tude. Voices on every side were heard murmuring that " He was gone, 
 in defiance of the Law, and of public feeling and patriotic duty, to lodge 
 with the chief publican." 
 
 They little knew the mighty change His having done so had, instanta- 
 neously, wrought in a soul hitherto degraded and lost, not less by an ignoble 
 life, than by the social prosci-iption which barred all hope of self -recovery. 
 Christ had completely overcome him, for He had treated him as a man, 
 with respect, and shovfu him that the way still lay open, even to him, to a 
 new and better future. The two had meanwhile, apparently, reached the 
 court of Zacclia3us' house, and the crowd pressed closely round as Jesus 
 T/as about to enter a dwelling, the threshold of which no respectable Jew 
 would think of crossing. He was braving a harsh public opinion, and 
 incurring the bitterest hatred of the Jewish religious leaders, by openly 
 disregarding the laws of ceremonial defilement, and by treating Avith 
 honour one whom they denounced as accursed. Zacchajus was over- 
 powered with a sense of the unselfish magnanimity which could prompt 
 such treatment of one who had no claim to it. He would signalise the ■ 
 event by an open and public vow. Standing before the crowd, therefore, 
 he addressed Christ: "Lord, I feel deeply the honour and loving service 
 you do me, and I hereby vow that I shall give one-half of my goods to the 
 poor, to show how much I thank Thee. And, still more, if as I lament to 
 think has been the case, I have ever taken any money from any one by 
 false accusation, I promise to repay him four-foid— the highest restitution 
 that even Eoman law demands from one guilty of such an offence."
 
 IN PEEEA. 599 
 
 "This day is salvation come to this house," said Jesus, as Ho heard such 
 words, " for this man, sinner though he be, is, nevertheless, a son of 
 Abraham, and now shows himself humbled and penitent. I came to seek 
 and to save that which was lost, and I rejoice to have won Ijack to tlie fold 
 of God, a child of Israel who had wandered so far from Him." He had 
 foreseen the whole incident, by His Divine power, and calmly ignored all 
 recognition of caste or class when a human soul was to be saved. 
 
 " Before you leave," He continued, still addressing the crowd in the 
 court-yard, or outside it, "let me tell you a parable. Iknowjvliat is in 
 your thoughts. You see that I am near Jerusalem, and suppose I shall 
 take advantage of the Passover, when such vast throngs of Jews are in the 
 Holy City, to proclaim the Kingdom of the Messiah in the way you expect, 
 by insurrection and force. Let me set before you the truth." 
 
 With that marvellous power of turning every incident to practical 
 account, which marked His teaching. He proceeded to repeat a parable 
 borrowed, in many particulars, from facts in their recent or passing 
 national history. Archelaus had set out for Eome, most likely from 
 Jericho itself, not many years before, to obtain investiture in the kingdom 
 left to him by the will of his father Herod, and the Jews had sent a fruit- 
 less embassy after him, to prevent his obtaining it. All the princes of the 
 house of Herod had, indeed, been only vassals of Eome, and had had to go 
 to the imperial city, in each case, to seek their kingdom as a gift from the 
 Eoman senate. 
 
 "A certain man," said He, " of noble birth, went to a distant country to 
 receive for himself the dignity of king over his former fellow-citizens, and 
 then to return. Before doing so, he called ten of his servants, from whom, 
 as such, he had the right to expect the utmost care for his interests in his 
 absence. He proposed, in his secret mind, to entrust them Avitli a small 
 responsibility, by their discharge of which he could judge, when he re- 
 turned, of their iitness and worthiness to be put into positions of greater 
 consideration ; for he wished to choose from them his future chief officers. 
 
 " In the meantime he gave them, each, only a mina, one hundred 
 drachmas, and said to them, 'Trade with this, on my account, till I return.' 
 If they proved to be faithful in this small matter, he would be able to 
 advance them to higher trusts. 
 
 " It happened, however, that he was so unpopular, that his fellow-citi- 
 zens, in their hatred of him, sent an embassy after him to the supreme 
 power, complaining against him, and contemptuously declaring that they 
 would not have such a man to rule over them. But their embassy failed ; 
 for, in spite of it, he obtained the province, and was appointed their king. 
 
 " On his return, after he had thus received the government, he ordered 
 the servants to whom he had given the money, to be called before him, 
 that he might know what each had gained by trading. The first came 
 and said, ' Lord, thy mina has gained ten.' ' Well done, good servant,' 
 replied his master, ' because thou wast faithful in a very little, be thou 
 governor of ten cities.' The second came, saying, ' Lord, thy mina has 
 gained five.' ' Be thou governor of five cities,' replied his master. But 
 another came, and said, ' Lord, here is thy mina, I have kept it safely tied
 
 600 THE LIFP] OF CHRIST. 
 
 up in a naiikin ; thou wilt find it just as I got it. I did not know what to 
 do with it, and I was afraid of thee ; for I know thou art a hard man in 
 money matters, looking for great profits where thou hast laid out next to 
 nothing, — taking up, as they say, what thou hast not put down, and, if 
 needs be, reaping where thou hast not sown,— making good thy loss, if 
 there were any, at his expense who caused it, — and so, to keej) my.swlf safe, 
 I thought it best to run no risks one way or other.' 
 
 '"I will judge you out of your own mouth, wicked servant,' replied his 
 master. ' You say you knew I was a hard man in money matters, seeking 
 gain where I had laid nothing out to secure it, and reaping where others 
 have sown, why then did you not at least give my money to some ox- 
 changer to use at his table, that thus, on my return, I might have got it 
 back with interest ? ' Then, turning to the servants standing b}'. he con- 
 tinued, ' Take from him the mina, and give it to him that has ten.' * He 
 has ten already,' muttered the servants, half afraid. But the king went 
 on in his anger, without heeding them, ' I tell you that to every one who 
 shows his fitness to serve me, by having already increased what I at first 
 gave him, I shall give more ; but I shall take away what I first gave, from 
 him, who, by adding nothing to it, has proved his unfitness to use what 
 might be put in his hands. 
 
 '"As to my enemies, who did not wish me to reign over them, bring 
 them hither, and jjut them to death in my presence.' " 
 
 The lessons of the parable could hardly be misundei'stood. To the 
 Jewish people, who would not receive Him as the Messiah, they spoke in 
 words of warning alarm; but the Twelve, themselves, heard a solemn 
 caution. They had each, in being selected as an Apostle, received a sacred 
 trust, to be used for his Master's interests, till the coming again in glory. 
 "Well for him, who, when his Lord returned to reckon with them, could 
 give a good account of his stewardship ; woe to him who had neglected 
 his duty ! Though called to the same honour at first as the others, as 
 an Apostle, he would be stripped of his rank, and receive no share in 
 the glory and dignities of the Messianic kingdom. As to the J.ews who 
 rejected Him, His coming would be the signal for the sorest judgments. 
 
 Having finished His brief stay in Jericho, Jesus set out, once Jnore, on 
 His journey of calm, self-sacrificing love, to Jerusalem, going on before 
 the multitude, in His grand consciousness of victory beyond thought. 
 Many had already gone up to the Holy City, for not a few needed to be 
 there some time before the feast, to jDrepare themselves to take part in 
 it, by purifications, necessary from various causes. Lepers, for example, 
 who had been cured, but were not as yet pronounced clean by the priests, 
 were, with many others, in this position. Great numbers, moreover, we 
 may be sure, went up early, for purposes of trade with the first arrivals of 
 pilgrims from abroad. 
 
 Meanwhile, all classes alike, in Jerusalem, discussed the probability of 
 Christ's coming to the feast. The excitement among the people was evi- 
 dent, and increased the alarm of the hierarchical party, for how could they 
 withstand Him, if He once gained general popular support ? The advice 
 of Caiaphas had, therefore, been accepted as the policy of the party at
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 601 
 
 large, and orders had been issued that He should be instantly arrested, 
 •when found. It was even required that any one -who knew where He was, 
 should report it, with a view to His apprehension. 
 
 In the midst of this commotion, Jesus quietly entered Bethanj-, on the 
 sixth day before the Passover. It was, however, impossible for Him to 
 remain concealed. The news passed from mouth to mouth, and the street 
 of the village soon became thronged with visitors, who came, not only to 
 see Him, but to see Lazarus also, whom they heard He had raised from 
 the dead. The high priests began to question whether they could not 
 manage to put him, also, to death. The sight of him was winning many 
 disciples to Jesus. They would try. 
 
 CHAPTER LY. 
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 
 
 r I THE long caravan of pilgrims that had accompanied Jesus up the wild 
 -■- gorge of the Kedron, from Jericho, had been left at Bethany ; some 
 pressing on to Jerusalem, others pitching their tents, as fancy pleased 
 them, in the pleasant dell below the village, or on the western slope of the 
 Mount of Olives, where they could feast their eyes with a sight of the 
 city. It was the eve of the Sabbath, and that night and the next day were 
 sacred. The journey from Jericho had been exhausting. A steep and 
 narrow bridle-path, threading the precipitous defile, had been the only road. 
 It was the scene of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The khan, where 
 the wounded man was sheltered, had been passed half way. Lonely ascents, 
 between bare rocks, with the worst footing, had been left behind only when 
 Bethany and Bethphage, on the eastern spur of the Mount of Olives, came 
 in sight. The journey was over before three in the afternoon, for it was 
 the rule to have three hours of rest before the Sabbath began, at six. In 
 Bethany, Jesus was at home. It was the village of Lazarus and Martha 
 and Mary. The fifteen miles from Jericho had been a continual climb of 
 over three thousand feet ; but He could now rest with His friends, through 
 the Sabbath. Before the next He would be crucified. And He knew it. 
 
 This glimpse of sweet rest over — the last He would enjoy before the 
 awful end ; the first act in the great tragedy, His triumphal entry into 
 Jerusalem, fitly led the way to the great consummation. 
 
 In these last months He had more and more openly assumed the 
 supreme dignity of Messiah, with wise caution. Hefraining at first from 
 a sudden proclamation of His office. He had carefully shunned popular 
 excitement even by the liublicatiou of His miracles ; that His words — 
 which were the true seed of His kingdom — might get time to root them- 
 selves, and bear fruit among the people, before the inevitable opposition 
 of the ecclesiastical authorities brought His work to a close. He had never, 
 however, refused the title when given Him, or the honours from time to 
 time paid him as the Christ. He had even revealed Himself to the woman 
 of Samaria; to the Apostles, first, on the Sea of Galilee, and afterwards.
 
 G02 Tlliu LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 with impressive solemnity, at Caasarea Philippi ; and, latterly, more than 
 once to His enemies, as the Head of the New Kingdom of God. But, as 
 yet. Ho had made no public, or as it were, official declaration, of His claims 
 and rights as the Messiah, and till this was done, there still wanted a for- 
 mal proclamation of His Kingdom before Israel and the world. Till then, 
 moreover, the heads of the moribund theocracy could not be said to have 
 had the choice openly given them, as the representatives of the religious 
 past, to accept Him as the Messiah, or definitely to reject Him. 
 
 He determined, therefore, with calm delibei'ation, and consciousness of 
 what it involved, to enter Jerusalem publicly, with such circumstance as 
 would openly announce His claim to be the Christ. He would also per- 
 form specific Messianic acts, in the very citadel of the theocracy ; entering 
 it under the eyes of the haughty, and yet alarmed, hierarchy, as a king, but 
 as the Prince of Peace, giving no real pretence for any charge of political 
 design, but clearly, as king only in a spiritual sense. He had no longer 
 any reason to conceal from the authorities what He really was, and felt 
 Himself to be. 
 
 The companies of pilgrims from the various towns and districts of 
 Palestine, or from Jewish settlements abroad, were wont to make public 
 entries into the city before the great feasts. Such an entry Jesus would 
 make. Himself its central figure. It would be a day of joy and gladness 
 to Him and to others, as when a king enters on his kingdom. He would 
 no longer check the popular feeling in His favour. His last entry to the 
 Holy City, at the Feast of Tabernacles, had been designedly secret ; but 
 this should be in exact contrast, for He knew that His kingly work was 
 now over, so far as it could, for the time, be completed, and the enthusiasm 
 of willing consecration to death, as His path to eternal triumpli, filled Him 
 with a serene and victorious joy. Misconception of His claim would be 
 impossible, in honest minds, in the face of facts. Israel should now sec 
 Him come openly, as He, who alone, if they frankly accepted Ilim, could 
 save them, by leading them as a nation, to true repentance and a higher 
 spiritual life. He knew beforehand, that they would not ; but His work 
 could not be said to be completely ended till He had given tliem and their 
 leaders this last public opportunity. 
 
 Hitherto lie had entered the Holy City on foot ; this day, like David 
 and the Judges of Israel, he would ride on an ass, the ancient symbol of 
 Jewish royalty. Nor must we think of AVcstern associations in connection 
 Avith the subject. In the East, the ass is in high esteem. Statelier, live- 
 lier, swifter than v/ith us, it vies with the horse in favour. Among the 
 Jews it was equally valued as a beast of burden, for work in the field or at 
 the mill, and for riding. In contrast to the horse, which had been intro- 
 duced by Solomon from Egypt, and was used especially for war, it was 
 the emblem of peace. To the Jew it was peculiarly national, for had not 
 Moses led his wife, seated on an ass, to Egypt ; had not the Judges ridden 
 on white asses ; and was not the ass of Abraham the friend of God, noted 
 in Scripture ? Every Jew, moreover, expected, from the words of one of 
 the prophets, that the Messiah would enter Jerusalem, poor, and riding on 
 an ass. 'No act could be more perfectly in keeping with the conception of
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 603 
 
 a king of Israel, and no words could express more plainly that tliat King 
 proclaimed Himself the Messiah. 
 
 On the early morning of Sunday, the tenth of ISTisan — the Jewish Mon- 
 day', therefore — Jesus and the Twelve left their hospitable shelter at Beth- 
 any, and passed out to the little valley beneath, with its clusters of fig, 
 almond, and olive trees, soon to burst into leaf, and its evergreen palms. 
 Somewhere near lay the larger village of Bethphage ; like Bethany, so 
 close to Jerusalem as to be reckoned, in the Eabbinical law, a part of it. 
 Secret disciples, such as the five hundred who afterAvards gathered to one 
 spot in Galilee, and the hundred and twenty, who met, after the resurrec- 
 tion, in the upper room in the Holy City, were scattered in many places. 
 At least one such lived in Bethphage. Jesus, therefore, now sent two dis- 
 ciples thither ; telling them that, immediately on entering it, they would 
 find a she ass tied, and her colt standing by her. " Loose and bring them 
 to me," said He, " and if any one make a remark, say that the Lord needs 
 them, and he will send them at once." His supernatural power had rightly 
 directed them. The ass and its colt were found, and the ready permission 
 of their owner — no doubt a disciple — was obtained at once, for their being 
 taken for His use. 
 
 Meanwhile, it had reached Jerusalem that He was about to enter it, and 
 great numbers of the Galiltean pilgrims, proud of Him as a prophet from 
 their own district, forthwith set out to meet and escort Him, cutting fronds, 
 as they came, from the palm-trees that then lined the path, to do Him 
 honour. The disciples showed equal enthusiasm, and it was forthwith 
 caught by the crowds around — for the whole open ground near the city 
 was filled with pilgrims at this season. The former hastily threw their 
 abbas on the back of the colt, to deck it for their Master, and set Him on 
 it, the mother walking at its side ; while the pilgrims, not to be behind, 
 spread theirs on the road, or cut off the young sprouts from the trees, and 
 strewed them before Him. So myrtle-twigs and robes had been strewn 
 by their ancestors before Mordecai, when he came forth from the palace 
 of Ahasuei'us, and so the Persian army had honoured Xerxes, when about 
 to cross the Hellespont, and so it is still sometimes done in Palestine, as 
 a mark of special honour. 
 
 There were three paths over the Mount of Olives ; on the north, in the 
 hollow between the two crests of the hill ; next, over the summit ; and 
 on the south, between the Mount of Olives and the Hill of Offence, still 
 the most frequented and the best. Along this Jesus advanced, preceded 
 and followed by multitudes, Avith loud cries of rejoicing, as at the Feast 
 of Tabernacles, when the great Hallel was daily sung in their processions. 
 With the improvisatorial turn of the East, their acclamations took a 
 rhythmical form, which v/as long chanted in the early Church as the first 
 Christian hymn. 
 
 " Give (Thou) the triumph, (0 Jehovah), to the Son of David ! 
 Blessed be the kingdom of our Father David, now to be restored in the 
 
 name of Jehovah ! 
 Blessed be He that cometh— the King of Israel — in the name of 
 ■ Jehovah !
 
 604 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Our jDeaco and salvation (now coming) are from God above ! 
 
 Praised bo lie in the highest heavens (for sending them by Him, tho 
 Son of David) ! 
 
 From the highest heavens, send Thou, now, salvation ! " 
 
 It was a triumph in wondrous contrast with that of earthly raonarchs. 
 No spoils of towns or villages adorned it; no trains of captives destined 
 to slavery or death ; the spoil of His sword and His spear were seen only 
 in trojjhies of healing and love — for the lame whom He had cured ran 
 before, the dumb sang His praises, and the blind, sightless no longer, 
 crowded to gaze on their benefactor. The Pharisees among the multitude 
 in vain tried to silence the acclamations. In their mortification they even 
 turned to Jesus Himself, to ask that He should rebuke those who made 
 them. " No," replied He, " I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, 
 the very stones will cry out." 
 
 As they approached the shoulder of the hill, where the road bends 
 downwards to the north, the sparse vegetation of the eastern slope changed* 
 as in a moment, to the rich green of gardens and trees, and Jerusalem in 
 its glory rose before them. It is hard for us to imagine, now, the s]jlondonr 
 of the view. The City of God, seated on her hills, shone at the moment 
 in the morning sun. Straight before stretched the vast white walls and 
 buildings of the Temple, its courts, glittering with gold, rising one above 
 the other; the steep sides of the Hill of David crowned with lofty walls; 
 the mighty castles towering above them ; the sumptuous palace of Herod 
 in its green parks, and the picturesque outlines of the streets. Over 
 all rested the spell of a history of two thousand years ; of a present 
 which craved salvation in its own jaerverted way ; and the mystic Holy 
 of Holies linked the seen to the invisible. The crusaders, long centuries 
 after, when the only glory left to the Holy City was its wondrous memories, 
 burst out into a loud cry— Jerusalem! Jerusalem! — when they first saw 
 it, and the enthusiasm of the Jew could not have been less intense. The 
 shouts and rejoicing rose higher than ever. 
 
 The whole scene was overpowering, even to Jesus Himself. He was 
 crossing the ground on which, a generation later, the tenth Koman legion 
 would be encamped, as part of the besieging force destined to lay in ashes 
 all the splendour before Him. Knowing the future as He did. His heart 
 1 was filled with indescribable sadness, for He was a patriot and man, 
 though also the Son of God. Looking at the spectacle before Him, and 
 thinking of the contrast a few years would show, tears burst from His 
 eyes, and His disciples heard Him saying — "Would that thou hadst known, 
 thou, Jerusalem, in this thy day, when I come, who alone can bring it — 
 what would give thee peace and safety ! But now, thou seest not what 
 only could make them thine — the receiving me as the Messiah! Days 
 will come upon thee, when thine enemies will raise a mount about thee, 
 and compass thee round, and invest thee on every side, and level thee with 
 the ground, and bury thy children under thy ruins, and leave not one 
 stone in tliee upon another, because thou knewest not the time when God, 
 through me, offered thee salvation ! " 
 
 Sweeping round to the north, the road approached Jerusalem by tho
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 605 
 
 bridge over the Kedron, to reacli which it had to pass Gctlisemane. The 
 myriads of pilgrims on the slopes of Olivet, and the crowd at the eastern 
 ■wall of the Temple, thus saw the procession ^yinding in slow advance, till 
 it reached the gate, now St. Stephen's, through which Jesus passed into 
 Bezetha— the new town — riding up the valley between it and Mount 
 Moriah, through narrow streets, hung with flags and banners for the feast, 
 and crowded, on the raised sides, and on every roof, and at every window, 
 with eager faces. " Who is this ? " passed from lip to lip. " It is Jesus, 
 the Prophet of Nazareth, in Galilee," shouted back the crowd of northern 
 pilgrims and disciples, glorying in the vindication of the honour of their 
 jirovince before the proud and contemptuous sons of Jerusalem. 
 
 Leaving His beast, and entering the Temple, which, having ridden. He 
 could do without preparation, except that of removing His sandals, though 
 the crowd with Him, if at such times the rules were enforced, had to stop 
 behind to cleanse their dusty feet, take off their shoes or sandals, and lay 
 aside their walking staves, before entering a place so holy, — He took pos- 
 session of it in the name and as the representative of Jehovah its Lord, 
 and closed the wondrous day by a calm and prolonged survey of all around. 
 Earnest, sad, indignant hours thus passed ; but even they were filled with 
 works of pitying goodness, for the blind and the lame had heard of His 
 coming, and hastened to Him, and were healed. The courts and halls 
 of the Sacred House — the very stronghold of His enemies, — re-echoed, to 
 their intense mortification, with the shouts that had accompanied His 
 entry to the city, for the miracles He wrought heightened and prolonged 
 the enthusiasm, till the very children joined in the cry of " Hosanna to 
 the Son of David ! " 
 
 " Do you see how powerless we are against Him ? " muttered the 
 Pharisees; "the whole people have gone after Him." 
 
 His bold appearance in the Temple itself, filled the priestly dignitaries 
 and Rabbis with indignation, which was all the deeper because they dared 
 not arrest Him for fear of the crowds, even when now in their very hand. 
 That the children should hail Him as the Messiah, also enraged them. 
 " Hearest thou not what these say ? " asked some of them. But instead 
 of disavowing the supreme honour ascribed to Him, He only replied that 
 He did, adding, " Have ye never read in your own Scriptures — ' Out of the 
 mouths of babes and sucklings. Thou (Jehovah) hast perfected praise, that 
 thou mightest put to shame Thine enemies, and silence Thy foes, and those 
 who rage against Thee.' " 
 
 Never was His presence of mind and cjuick aptness of retort shown more 
 strikingly. 
 
 The day was now far spent. The end proposed had been abundantly 
 attained. The crowds had begun to retire after evening prayers, and He, 
 too, with the Twelve, passed out quietly with the throng, and betook Him- 
 self once more to the well-loved cottage at Bethany. 
 
 The day in which He had thus virtually consecrated Himself to death, 
 was that, by no chance coincidence, on which the paschal lamb was selected. 
 
 It is easy to understand the statement of the Gospels, that neither the 
 Twelve nor the disciples at large realized at first the full significance of
 
 606 THE LIFE OE CHRIST. 
 
 what had happened. In Liter times, however, after lie had risen and 
 ascended to heaven, its full grandeur slowly broke on them as llioy dis- 
 coursed again and again on the whole strange history through which they 
 had passed. They remembered, then, the words of the prophet Zechariah, 
 and saw how the trium])hal entry in which they had taken part, had been 
 the divinely designed fulfilment of ancient prophecy. 
 
 The entry on Palm Sunday, though, for the moment, a bitter mortifica- 
 tion to the hierai'chical party, was presently hailed by them as a fancied 
 mistake on the part of Jesus. Till now, all their clforts to frame any 
 capital charge against Ilim, on plausible grounds, had utterly failed. He 
 had slighted the Rabbinical laws ; but the Romans, with whom lay the 
 power of life and death, would take no cognizance of such offences. His 
 jDublic entry into Jerusalem, as the Messiah, amidst the shouts of the people 
 seemed to give them, at last, the means of indicting Him for what they 
 could represent as at least constructive treason— the claiming to be king 
 instead of Ca3sar. The Romans dreaded nothing more than assumption of 
 the Mcssialiship, for it had often cost them dear to quell the insurrections 
 to which it led, and they wci-e stern to the uttermost against any attempt to 
 challenge the Emperoi''s authority. But the absolutely peaceful bearing of 
 Jesus, throughout : His studied care to make no illegal use of the popular 
 enthusiasm ; the quiet dispersion of the crowds, and the utter absence of 
 any political character in His whole life and words, were fatal to judicial 
 action based on grounds so slender. They would not, however, let such a 
 charge against Him slip, and could accuse Him to Pilate, if other charges 
 failed, of " perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Ctesar, 
 saying that He, Himself, is Christ, a king." 
 
 Morning saw Jesus once more on His way to the Temple. He had not 
 as yet eaten, for He seems to have looked forward to doing so at the home 
 of some disciple in Jerusalem, and the keen air of the early hours made 
 Him hungry. The little valley of Bethany was famous for dates and figs ; 
 the very name Bethany meaning " the place for dates," while Bethphagc is 
 " the place for the green or winter fig " — a variety which remains on the 
 trees through the winter, having ripened only after the leaves had fallen. 
 
 It was not yet the time of the fig harvest, but some of last year's fruit 
 might, no doubt, be found on the trees growing about. One tree, especially, 
 attracted the notice of Jesus. It grew at the road-side, as common pro- 
 perty, and, even thus early, when other fig-trees had scarcely begun to 
 show greenness, was conspicuous by its young leaves. When he came to 
 it, however, they proved its only boast ; there was no fruit of the year 
 before, as might have been natui'ally expected. It was, indeed, the very 
 type of a fair profession without perfoi^mance ; of the hypocrisy which has 
 only leaves, and no fruit. Such a realized parable could not be passed in. 
 silence by One who drew a moral from every incident of life and nature. 
 " Picture of boastful insincerity," said He, loud enough for the disciples to 
 hear — " type of Israel and its leaders ; pretentious, but bearing no fruit 
 to God — let no fruit grow on thee henceforward, for ever," and passed on. 
 They were to learn that profession, without performance, found no favour 
 witli their Master.
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 607 
 
 Reaching the city, He once more went to the Temple, as His Father's 
 house. Two years before, He had purified its outer court from the sordid 
 abuses which love of gain had dexterously cloaked under an affectation of 
 piously serving the requirements of worship. Since then, they had been 
 restored in all their hatefulness. The lowing of oxen, the bleating of 
 sheep, the cries of the money-changers, and the noisy market chaffering of 
 buyers and sellers of doves or other accessories to a ceremonial worship, 
 filled the air with discordant sounds of the outside world, which had no 
 right in these sacred precincts. Tlie scene roused the same deep indigna- 
 tion in Jesus, as when He formerly rose in His grand protest against it. 
 He had now, in His triumphal entry, formally proclaimed His Kingdom, 
 and would, forthwith, vindicate its rights, by once more restoring the 
 Temple to its becoming purity ; for while it stood, it should be holy. The 
 same fervent zeal again dismayed and paralysed opposition. Filled, as all 
 minds were, with the aAve of the popular enthusiasm in His behalf, His 
 command sufficed to clear the spacious court of its motley crowd : the 
 sellers of doves, at His order, bore off their cages ; the exchangers 
 gathered up their coin, and He made the one remove their benches and 
 counters, and overturned the empty booths of the others. ISTor would He 
 suffer the desecration, of laden porters and others seeking to shorten their 
 journeys by crossing the Temple spaces, as if they were public streets. 
 They might carry them round by what way they chose, but must not make 
 a thoroughfare of the sacred courts. " Jehovah has written," said He, 
 " My house is the house of prayer for all nations, but ye, bringing in all 
 the wiles and cheats of unworthy traffic, have made it a den of thieves." 
 
 We cannot suppose that Jesus, within a few hours of His death at the 
 hands of the Temple authorities, and immediately after His lament over 
 His rejection by them and the nation, intended, by this cleansing of the 
 outer Temple spaces, to present Himself as a reformer of the Temple 
 service. He meant, rather, to show, among other things, to the multi- 
 tudes round Him, by an act which they could not mistake, that the Holy 
 House was already desecrated by the sanctioned intrusion of the spirit of 
 common gain, and made no better than a huge bazaar, with all its abuses, 
 doubly unworthy in such a place. He wished to teach them, by the sight 
 of such insensibihty to the ideal of a Temple of God, that the fall of the 
 theocracy, with its scoffing high priests and worn-out ceremonial, was a 
 fact already begun. The very texts He had quoted were from lamentations 
 over the religious decay of the nation, which, the prophets predicted, 
 would bring the stranger into the House of Jehovah, as more worthy than 
 the Jew ; a decay which demanded, instead of mere outward service, a 
 reform of the heart and life. But the great lesson, also, was not wanting, 
 that the worship of God must be pure and earnest, not merely formal, and 
 that hypocrisy was abhorrent to Him. This truth sank that day into all 
 hearts, and before a generation had passed, it had been repeated from the 
 Euphrates to Rome. It was the knell of the Jewish economy at its centre, 
 for a Temple thus publicly marked as given over to greed and gain, under 
 pretence of zeal for religion, was doomed to perish, as all hypocrisies 
 must, in the end.
 
 608 THE LIFE OF CHllIST. 
 
 The significance of such an act to Himself, was known to none better 
 than to Jcsns. He knew that His hour liacl come, and that He would perish, 
 a martyr to the spirit of a living, as 0])poscd to the letter of a worn-ont, 
 faith. He knew that He had against Him the vast power of great vested 
 interests, who passed off their selfish aims as zeal for Church and State, 
 and thus won support from unthinking thousands. He knew, moreover, 
 that the religious revolution He had begun was spreading daily, and must 
 be crushed by His opponents, by any measures that promised success, if 
 their own authority were to stand. But, in the face of all this, He went 
 forward with calm serenity towards death, as the one pnrcliasc price of 
 liberty and life for the souls of men. 
 
 The day, which had begun with the symbolic cleansing of the Temple, 
 Avas devoted, in its later hours, to His wonted work of teaching all who 
 would listen, but none of the discourses have been preserved. The people, 
 thronging the court where he sat — for He taught in the Temple — were 
 greatly impressed by His words ; so new, so earnest, so searching and 
 practical, compared with the vapidities of the Eabljis. It was vain for 
 the Jewish authorities to attempt to arrest Him while He was thus in 
 favour, for all the people rallied to hear Him, and no one knew how far 
 they might be disposed, with their fiery Eastern natures, to rise on His 
 behalf, if He were seized. 
 
 This day, therefore, passed as safely for Him as the last, and in tlie 
 evening Bethany once more received Him. He had entered the city with 
 loud jubilees, but the last mortal struggle, bcgixu by His lofty bearing and 
 independence, made it wise to retire unnoticed. Leaving, therefore, 
 privately, by the flight of steps to the Kedi'on, He crossed Olivet with 
 only His disciples. 
 
 The sensation caused by the great act of the day must have been pro- 
 found. The religious instinct of the masses felt that it was worthy of a 
 true prophet of God, Ijut the Temple officials realized only the public 
 censure it implied on their own estimate and discharge of their duties. 
 For the moment they were paralysed and helpless, rebuked before all, and 
 boldly condemned" by the strange intruder, in exactly the point on which 
 they were most sensitive ; for it was as watchful guardians of the Temple 
 they claimed especially the respect of the nation. 
 
 l^ext morning found Him once more on the way to the Temple. "Eabbi," 
 exclaimed Peter, in wonder, as they passed the tree on which Jcsns harl 
 sought figs the day before, " the fig-tree which Thou cursedst is withered 
 away." It had, indeed, already shrivelled up. 
 
 The question gave another opportunity for impressing on the Twelve a 
 truth, which, above all others, He had sought to fix in their hearts dnring 
 His three years' intercourse with them — that, as His Apostles, commis- 
 sioned to establish and spread His Kingdom, they would be able, if they 
 had an unwavering faith in God and in Him, to overcome all difficulties, 
 however apparently insuperable. 
 
 " See," replied He, " that you learn from this tree to have firm trust in 
 God. Believe me, if you have such faith, and let no doubt or hesitation 
 enfeeble it, you will be able hereafter to do not only such things as yoi
 
 PALM SUNDAY. GOO 
 
 have seen done to this tree, but— to use the expression you so often hear 
 from the Kabbis, when they intend to speak of overcoming the greatest 
 difficulties, or achieving the most unlikely ends— you will be able, as it 
 were, to bid this mountain rise and cast itself into the sea. All depends, 
 however, on your faith being simple and undoubtiug ; for anything less 
 dishonours God. He who has such child-like trust in Him, may confi- 
 dently expect his prayers to be heard. "When you pray, believe tliat 
 praj'er is, in very deed, answered, and your faith will be honoured by God 
 granting what you seek ; since as His children, and my discij^les, you will 
 ask only what is in accordance with His will. You must, however, in your 
 prayers, always be in that frame of loving tendei'ness to your fellow-men, 
 which true faith in God, as His sons, never fails to create. Strife and 
 division destroy your spiritual life, and weaken that faith by which, alone, 
 you can do great things. As you stand at your prayers, as your manner is, 
 you must have no anger, no revenge in your hearts, else you will not be 
 heard. The spirit of frank forgiveness, which springs from true love to 
 God, must, beforehand, have forgiven all who have injured 3^ou. For how 
 can you hope that your Father in heaven will forgive your sins against 
 Him, if you do not forgive offences against yourselves P " 
 
 But the moments were precious, for His hours were numbered. Always, 
 from the first, intensely energetic, He was now, if possible, more so 
 than ever, that He might utilize every instant for His great purpose. 
 "With calm, undismayed resolution, each morning saw Him in the Temple, 
 as soon as it was opened. He would show that He was no Jacobin, no 
 revolutionist. Had He been so, how easily might He have taken advan- 
 tage of the popular enthusiasm, at His entry to the city, or at His cleansing 
 of the Temple courts. Instead of doing so. He would proclaim the true 
 nature of His Kingdom, by the one means He employed to establish it — ■ 
 the power of persuasion. He would devote His last hoixrs, as He had all 
 His public life, to teaching. By His words alone would He prevail, for 
 they had the irresistible and deathless force of truth, and, as such, would 
 found in every heart whose convictions they reached, a kingdom that must 
 spread, and could never perish. 
 
 Meanwhile, His enemies determined to destroy Him, though undecided 
 what course to pursue to effect their purpose. Afraid of the popular 
 feeling they might evoke in His favour, they watched for any opportunity 
 to facilitate decisive action. Their bearing had acquitted Him of all 
 further responsibility towards them. He had brought the truth home to 
 them in their central stronghold ; had made it unmistakable what He de- 
 manded in the name of His Father, that they should begin the reform and 
 salvation of the nation by reforming themselves, its leaders ; that they 
 should be true shepherds, and not hirelings ; sincere in their religion, and 
 not actors. Such demands, in themselves, proved His Messiahshij), for 
 they bore on their front the evidence that they were from God, and if 
 accepted. He also must be who had thus been sent from God to proclaim 
 them. The internal evidence of His acts and words thus established His 
 highest claims; for triith and goodness are their own witness in the 
 universal conscience. But the hierarchy had shown themselves incapable
 
 GIO THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 of reform. Like tlie barren fig-tree, they bore only leaves, and miLst bo 
 left to the righteous indignation of God. 
 
 He had not been long instructing the people, who flocked to see and hear 
 Him, before some of the Temple authorities came to Him, determined to 
 bring Him to account for His act of the day before, -which had been au 
 intriision on their duties as TemiDle-inspectors ; and for His assuming to 
 teach as a Eabbi, without any licence from the schools, which was contrary 
 to established rule. They seem to have been a deputation sent officially, and 
 consisted of some of the higher priests — heads of the different cour.scs — some 
 Eabbis, and some of the " elders," the ancient senators or representatives 
 of the people, who, as a body, had existed through all political changes, from 
 the days of Moses. Interrupting Jesus as He taught, thej^ now abruptly 
 asked Him by what aiithority He acted as He had done, and was doing. 
 
 They, doubtless, hoped that He would claim Divine authority, and that 
 they, thus, might have ground for a charge against Him. But He was not 
 to be snared. He showed Himself the dreaded, promj^t, keen disputant, 
 ready to turn defence into attack. Careful to avoid giving any handle for 
 misrepresentation, instead of an.swering their truest ion, He evaded it b^^ 
 asking one in His turn. "Before I answer j'ou," said He, "let me ask 
 jou — Did John the Baptist, in his great work, act by direction of God, as 
 one sent by Him, or was he unauthorized .P " To be themselves inter- 
 rogated in turn ; to be forced to give a reply, instead of listening to one, 
 was sufficiently enibari'assing, but the question itself was still more so. It 
 involved much. Jesus evidently associated Himself Avith John as He had 
 never before done. He implied that the man who had been the terror of 
 Pharisees and priests, and their victim — the man of the people, who had 
 roused such an unprecedented excitement — was His Forerunner and He- 
 rald. He spoke of John's baptism as a commission from God, and evidently 
 claimed that His own entry to Jerusalem, His preaching of the Kingdom 
 of Heaven, His cleansing the Temple, and His claim to be the Messiah, 
 Avere no less by Divine authority. 
 
 He, Himself, might say all this if He pleased, but that they should have 
 to say it, was to force them to become His advocates and apologists. Yet, 
 wluit could they do, for was it not clear to all men not blind to the truth, 
 that John was no mere adventurer, but a noble servant of God ? To own 
 that he was so, however, Avould bring down on themselves the crushing 
 question, " Why then did ye not believe what he said respecting yourselves, 
 and what he said of me ? for his witness, alone, is enough to i^rove that I 
 come from God." On the other hand, to denounce him as an impostor was 
 dangerous, for his memory was cherished by the people at large, as that of 
 a national hero, the last of the mighty line of prophets. To avoid so 
 disastrous a dilemma, therefore, they were driven to the feeble evasion — 
 that they could not tell whether John's mission was from God or not. 
 
 " If so," replied Jesus, " then clearly he did not need your authority, 
 since you never thought it worth while to sanction, or even decide, re- 
 specting him, and you can have no claim to authorize me, or to withhold 
 authority from me. I, myself decline therefore to tell by what authority 
 I act ; if it v/as indilferent in the case of John, it is equally so in mine."
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 611 
 
 He liad silenced His O2:)poneiits, but would not let them leave without 
 once more trying to open their eyes to their false position. 
 
 " Let me tell you a parable," He continued. " A certain man had two 
 sons. He came to the first and said, ' Son, go work to-day in the vine- 
 yard.' But he answered, ' I will not ; ' yet, afterwards, he rejiented and 
 went. And he came to the second son, who, on receiving the same com- 
 mand, at once answered, 'Yes, sir.' But he did not go. Let me ask you, 
 which of the two, do you think, did the will of his father ?" 
 
 The perfect composure and the consummate art with which He addressed 
 them, were equally perplexing ; for high dignitaries of the Jewish religious 
 world must have been little accustomed to be put in such a position before 
 the multitude. But an answer could not be refused, and the question was 
 framed in such a way, that they could give none but the one which Jesus 
 required for His complete justification, and their own condemnation. 
 Hardly seeing what it implied, they readily answered, " The first." They 
 were now in His hands. " You say rightly," replied He, " for when John 
 came calling you, in the name of God — you priests, scribes, and elders — 
 to repentance and righteousness, you honoured him by ready professions 
 and smooth compliance, promising all good works of a pious and holy life, 
 and yet you held aloof, after all, and showed, by your neglect to obey him, 
 that you disbelieved his message. You are the second son, who said, Yes, 
 but did not go into the vineyard. 
 
 " On the other hand, the publicans and harlots, whom you despise, the 
 common people at large, whom you reckon cursed of God; who had 
 roughly and wickedly refused to do right, and had even gone to the utmost 
 in sin, repented at the summons of John, believing his words, and sought 
 earnestly to enter into the Kingdom of God. They, therefore, condemn 
 you, ye leaders of the people ; foi% by your own showing, they have done 
 the will of their Father in Heaven, but you have not. 
 
 " It has, indeed, been always the same. As in John's day, ye would not 
 hear him, but persecuted him to the death, so have both you and your 
 fathers done in all generations. You, indeed, are guiltier than they all, 
 for you seek to do even worse. Hear another parable." 
 
 He had spoken of the call of God by the mouth of John, and by implica- 
 tion affirmed that His own experience, as the successor of the Baptist in 
 bis great work, had been the same. He now glanced at the history of the 
 Theocracy, and at the sins of its leaders, from its earliest days. He re- 
 counted the long roll of the servants of God whom they had slandered, 
 wronged, and slain, from the first to the last, and greatest of them all — 
 Himself. In doing so. He now first openly called Himself the Son of God, 
 and left them to feel that He stood as such in their presence, awaiting at 
 their hands the fate of other messengers of His Father. His death was to 
 brim the cup of their iniquity. 
 
 " A certain man," said He, adopting a parable of Isaiah, " jolanted a viiae- 
 yard, and set a hedge about it, and hewed out a cistern in the hill-side, in 
 which to press the wine, and built a tower for the watchers, to guard the 
 vineyard, and agreed with husbandmen to work it on his behalf, and went 
 into a far country for a long time. And when the fruit season di-ew near,
 
 612 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 he scut his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive for him 
 his fruits. But they took them, and beat one, and killed another, and 
 stoned a third. He then sent other servants, more numerous than the 
 first ; but the husbandmen treated them as badly, for they beat one, cast 
 stones at another and Avouiided him in the head, and sent him away not 
 only empty-handed but shamefully treated. Some of the rest they beat, 
 others they killed, and they refused to pay the fruits they owed. 
 
 "Having yet, therefore, a sou — his only and well-beloved, — he deter- 
 mined to send him to them, thinking that, though they had treated his 
 sei'vants so badly, they would be sure to show his son respect. But 
 instead of this, when they saw the son, they said among themselves, * This 
 is the son, come, let us kill him, and the vineyard, which he should have 
 inherited, will be ours.' So they took him, and cast him out of the vine- 
 yard, and slew him. 
 
 " Let me ask you now, what will the lord of the vineyard do to these 
 husbandmen ? " 
 
 The dignitaries thus addressed could not, in the presence of the crowd 
 listening to all that had passed, refuse the only possible answer. " He 
 will come and miserably destroy these wretched men," said their spokes- 
 man, "and give the vineyard to others, who will render him his fruits in 
 their seasons." The meaning of the parable had already flashed on the 
 minds of some of them, and the answer was followed by a deep " God 
 forbid ! " from several voices. 
 
 Looking full and steadily at them, Jesus now kept them from retiring 
 by a further question. 
 
 " Did you never read in the Scriptures," said He, " this text, ' The stone 
 which the builders rejected is made the chief corner-stone — the main foun- 
 dation; Jehovah hath done this ; marvellous is it in our eyes ? ' " 
 
 The meaning was clear. The corner-stone of the Kingdom of God, of 
 which those in His presence claimed to be the chief men, was, in their own 
 mode of speech, only a figurative name for the Messiah, on whom its exist- 
 ence and completion depended, as a building depends on its foundation 
 and support. The Psalm quoted had, it is believed, been sung by Israel, 
 on the first Feast of Tabernacles after the return from Captivity. Its 
 historical reference was primarily to the Jewish nation — rejected by the 
 heathen, yet chosen again by God as the foundation of His earthly king- 
 dom. In a higher spii-itual sense, however, the Rabbis themselves under- 
 stood it of the Messiah, and thus there could be no doubt in the mind of 
 any Jew that, when now applied by Christ to Himself, it was a direct claim 
 of Messianic dignity. 
 
 "You know this verse, do you not?" continued Jesus: "Well, then, 
 because the stone which you have rejected has been chosen by God as the 
 foundation-stone of His New Spiritual Kingdom, every one who shall fall 
 on it— that is, every one who, by rejecting me, the Messiah, shall have 
 drawn down on himself, destruction — will perish ; but he on whom it will 
 fall— he, I mean, on whom I, the Messiah, will let loose my avenging 
 judgments, for his rejection of me— will be crushed to pieces, small as the 
 dust or chaff that is scattered to the winds.
 
 PALM SUNDAY. G13 
 
 "Therefore, I say to you, the Kingdom of God shall be taken from 
 Israel, and from you, its present heads, and be given to a nation who will 
 render to God the fruits He has a right to claim from it." 
 
 The guilty consciences of the chief priests and Pharisees addressed, felt, 
 instinctively, that in these parables He had pointed to them. The vine, 
 yard of God, separated from the wilderness of heathenism was, clearly, 
 Israel. The Jews had been favoured by having the " noble vine " of 
 Divine institutions among them. The tower which protected them was 
 the Temple of God ; the husbandmen were the successors of Moses, — the 
 Priests, Eabbis, and Pharisees, the representatives of God, to whom of old, 
 when He returned to heaven from Mount Sinai, He had left His vineyard 
 with the charge to tend it, and to render Him duly its fruits. The servants 
 sent were, clearly, the prophets, from their first appearance, in the distant 
 past, to John the Baptist. They had been despised, beaten, martyi'ed. 
 Only one could follow them — the last and highest representative of God, 
 who should have commanded respect even from murderers — His only and 
 well-beloved Son, the Messiah, who had come, not as the nation fancied, 
 to bring them political glory and earthly prosperity, but to receive and 
 bear to His Father the fruits which, kept back for hundreds of years, 
 could no longer remain withheld. But Jesus, the Messiah, had long fore- 
 seen His fate. He had had it before His eyes every hour since His public 
 entry into Jerusalem. He, the rightful heir of the vineyard, had been 
 received by the husbandmen Avith jealous eyes and deadly pui^poses. The 
 revolt He had come to end had grown worse. No longer contented with 
 refusing to render the fruits, the holders of the vineyard now claimed it 
 as their own, and were taking it into their own hands ; casting out God, in 
 casting out Him whom He had sent. The fierce anger of God could not 
 long delay. The rebels, smitten by His wrath, must perish. The vineyard 
 must pass into other hands. But " the others " could only be the heathen, 
 whom Israel despised. Loyal to the Son, whom Israel had rejected and 
 slain. His disciples and followers, gathered from other nations, would be 
 entrusted with the inheritance. Changing the figure, these would willingly 
 accept, as the foundation and chief corner-stone of the ISTew Kingdom of 
 God, Him whom the first builders— of whom those now before Him were 
 the representatives — had rejected. Was there any doubt that God would 
 ti'ansfer that kingdom to those thus loyal to His Son? He who now 
 stood before them, and who at any moment might be cast out of the 
 Temple with ignominy, and slain, must be the foundation of the New 
 Theocracy which was to supplant the Old ! 
 
 The first open attempt at violence followed this parable. The hier- 
 archical party felt that they were meant, and that Jesus had dared to call 
 Himself the chief corner-stone of the future Kingdom of God, which was 
 to rise in the place of that with which all their dignities and interests 
 were bound up. With wild Eastern frenzy, they sought to arrest Him on 
 the spot. But as looks and words, passing among them, betraj-ed their 
 intention to the crowds around, these would not permit Him to be taken, 
 counting Him, if not the Messiah, at least a prophet. Some, bolder than 
 the rest, possibly laid hands on Him, but they were forced by the surging
 
 G14 THE LIFE OF CUEIST. 
 
 miiltitude to release Him. They had to leave the place, and suffer Jesus 
 to escape for the moment. But they had power, and organization, and the 
 people would not always be round Him ! 
 
 Left in peace, the unwearying Divine Man once more calmly betook 
 Himself to His task of teaching all who would hear. 
 
 The die had finally been cast, and the open breach between Him and the 
 Church authorities had been proclaimed by Himself in His last parables. 
 Full of lofty indignation at the hypocrisy and wilful blindness of His 
 adversaries, no less than of compassion for the multitude, He could not 
 rej)ress the crowding thoughts which the last hours raised in His soul, 
 and, as usual, they found expression in additional parables. 
 
 "The Kingdom of Heaven," He began, "is like a king who made a 
 marriage-feast for his son, and sent forth his servants, as the custom is, 
 to tell those who had already been invited that the time had now arrived. 
 But, though thus once and again summoned, they would not come. Yet, 
 the king, unwilling, in his goodness, that they should not enjoy the feast; 
 in spite of this, sent other servants, once more, to invite them again. 
 ' Come,' ran his message, ' for I have prepared the first meal of the feast ; 
 my oxen and fatlings have been killed, and all things are ready : come to 
 the marriage.' But they made light of this fresh invitation as well, and 
 went off, one to his farm, another to his merchandise, while still others 
 took his servants, and ill-treated, and even killed them. Then the king 
 was angry, and sent his soldiers, and destroyed those murderers, and 
 burned their city. Meanwhile, he said to his servants, 'The marriage 
 feast is ready, but those who have been called were not worthy. Go, there- 
 fore, to the highways, where the roads cross and there are most passers-by, 
 and invite to the feast as many as ye find.' 
 
 " So the servants went forth from the palace of the king, to the roads 
 and cross-ways, and gathered together all, both evil and good, who were 
 willing to accept their invitations, and the feast-chamber was filled with 
 guests. 
 
 " The king had made all prepai-ations for these being nobly arrayed in 
 festal robes, so as to be worthy to appear before him. 
 
 " But, now, when he came in to welcome them, he saw among them a 
 man who had not put on a marriage robe. ' Friend,' said he to him, ' how 
 is it that you have como in hither without a marriage garment ? You 
 must needs have known that I jDrovided robes, fit for my presence, for all 
 my guests, and that, to refuse or slight what is thus offered is to show me 
 the worst affront. You know that to do so is to raise the severest indig- 
 nation in a king thus offended.' 
 
 " But the man was sjieechless, for he could not excuse himself. 
 
 " Then said the king to his attendants, ' Bind him hand and foot, and 
 cast him into the thick darkness outside.' 
 
 " Ye know," added Jesus, " how dark our streets are in the night ; no 
 windows opening on them, and no lights illumining them. That darkness 
 is but a type of the awful night into which he will be cast out, who appears 
 at the marriage feast of the Messiah's kingdom without the marriage robe 
 provided by my Father. In that darkness there will, indeed, be weeping
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 615 
 
 and gnashing of teetli, for though multitudes are invited to the feast of 
 the heavenly kingdom, many neglect to secure the marriage-robe, without 
 which no one can see the king ! " 
 
 The parable was an enforcement of those just addressed to the i^riests 
 and Eabbis, but with various additional lessons. The haughty sons of 
 Jerusalem heard, once more, that Vvhen the kingdom of the Messiah should 
 be set up in its glory, God would call the heathen to a sha,re in it, while 
 the people of Israel, with their religious leaders— because, as a nation, 
 they had rejected his repeated invitations — would no longer be the one 
 people of God. Still more, they would be visited with the avenging wrath 
 of God, in the destruction of Jerusalem, even before the final triumphant 
 estal)liyhmeut of the New Divine Kingdom. Yet, among the heathen in- 
 vited to enter it, as among the Jews, God, at the day of judgment, when 
 the king'dom was finally set uji for eternity, would separate and judge 
 those who had been wanting in loyalt}' to Him, and had come into His 
 presence without the preparation demanded. Such would be cast into the 
 outer darkness of Gehenna. 
 
 Thus, in the very presence of imminent death, there was the same tran- 
 quillity and repose as on the free hills of Galilee, or in the safe retreat of 
 Cfesarea Philippi; the same stupendous claims as Head of the New King- 
 dom of God, and King over the souls of men, for time and eternity. 
 Within a few hours of crucifixion, and conscious of the fact ; in the in- 
 ter\ als of mortal contest with the whole forces of the past and present, 
 the wandering Galilasan Teacher, — meek and lowly in spirit, so that the 
 poorest and the youngest instinctively sought Him; full of Divine pity, 
 so that the most sunken and hopeless penitent felt He was their friend; 
 indifferent to the supports of influence, wealth, or numbers ; alone and 
 poor; the very embodiment of weakness, as regarded all visible help, — 
 still bore Himself with a serene dignity more than human. In tlie name 
 of God He transfers the spiritual glory of Israel to llis own followers; 
 throws down the barriers of caste and nationality; extends the new 
 dominion of which He is Head, to all races, and through all ages, here and 
 hereafter; predicts the Divine wrath on His enemies in this world, as the 
 enemies of God, and announces the decision of the final judgment as 
 turning on the attitude of men towards Himself and His message. The 
 grandeur of soul which could so utterly ignore the outvrai'd and apparent, 
 and dwell on the essential and eternal; the conscious majesty in the midst 
 of humiliation and danger; the absolute trust that, if the present belonged 
 to His adversaries, the everlasting future, in earth and heaven, was all 
 His own, could spring in such a heart, only because it felt that it was not 
 alone, but that, unseen by man, a greater than man was ever with Him. 
 Only when we realize Him as enjoying unclouded and absolute communion 
 with eternal truth and love— Man, but also the Incarnate Divine— can r>-e 
 ho]3c to solve the mystery.
 
 616 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 « 
 
 CHAPTER LVI. 
 
 JERUSALEM. 
 
 IT was still Tuesday, and Jesus had not yet left the Temple courts. Tlio 
 deputation from the Temple authorities had come to Him in the early 
 morning, only to retire mortified and silenced ; but the interests of all 
 parties were threatened by One who demanded changes so fundamental. 
 
 All alike, therefore, however hostile at other times, made common cause 
 in trying to get the hated Eoformer into their power. It was the same 
 spirit as, in after ages, when far less fiercely roused, burned Aimold of 
 Brescia and John Huss, and strangled and burnt Savonarola, and slew 
 the thousands, of victims of the Inquisition : the non possumus of a corrupt 
 ecclesiastical corporation, which would murder in the name of God, be- 
 cause that could be called orthodoxy ; but would not reform, because tu do 
 so would touch their emoluments and their dignity. 
 
 Plot, therefore, thickened on plot. Having themselves failed, iiio 
 authorities sent some of the Pharisees in company with Hei'odians, o'utior- 
 wise their deadly enemies, to try to entangle Him by the answers He 
 might give to treacherous questions. Obscure men were chosen, men un- 
 known to Jesus. They were to pretend themselves anxious, as sincere 
 Jews, scrupulous in all duties, to get His counsel on a point much disputed. 
 The snare was no longer laid in the sphere of Rabbinical law, but in the 
 more dangerous one of political obligation, that an ambiguous answer 
 might compromise Him before the Roman procurator. If they succeeded, 
 it would at once transfer the odium of His arrest from themselves, ensure 
 His not being rescued, and make it possible to get Him put to death, for 
 the power of death was in Pilate's hands alone. 
 
 The Pharisees and Herodians, though from different principles, were 
 equally disloyal in heart to the Roman Emperor. The exti'eme section of 
 the former had developed into the sanguinary Zealots — the extreme left, 
 or irreconcilables, of Jewish politics ; the Herodians were Jewish royalists, 
 who sighed for the old days of Archelaus and the Edomite dynasty. 
 With dexterous craft, the ultra-orthodoxy of the Pharisaic party allied it- 
 self with the discontented royalist faction, to tempt Jesus, if possible, to 
 some bold expression of opinion on the hated question of the payment of 
 the Roman poll-tax, which had already excited fierce insurrections. If 
 He held that payment should be refused, He would compromise Himself 
 with the Romans ; if He sanctioned it. He would embitter Himself both 
 with the Herodians and the ultra-national pai'ty. Danger lay on each 
 hand. On the one, the fierce eyes of the multitude ; on the other, the 
 bailiffs of Herod ; here, the cry, " Publicans, sinners ; " there, a Roman 
 dungeon. To disarm suspicions, they used 
 
 " Smooth dissimulation, taught to grace 
 A devil's purpose with an angel's face." 
 
 *' Teacher," said they, with soft accents and humble looks, " we know^ 
 indeed, we are fully convinced — that Thou teachest what God requires of 
 man as his duty in all matters, truly and rightly, and troublest not Thyself
 
 JERUSALEM. 617 
 
 about the opinions of men, but fearlessly and nobly speakest what truth 
 demands, without thinking of consequences, and without caring who hears 
 Thee, whether he be rich or jDoor, learned or simple, powerful or lowly. Is 
 it lawful for us Jews to pay tribute to CtEsar, or not? We are the people 
 of God ; God is our King ; is it in accordance with the allegiance we owe 
 to Him, as such, to recognise any other king, as we must do if we pay 
 taxes to Ciijsar ? " It was on such reasoning that Judas the Gaulonite had 
 based his fierce revolt against payment of the tax demanded after the 
 census of Quirinius, and his name and opinions were venerated by the 
 closely packed multitude around. Every Galilaean among them expected 
 a stern avowal of the illegality of the demand. For Judas had taught the 
 youth of the country, that to pay taxes to a heathen state was not allow- 
 able, and defiled the land, and thousands had lived as fugitives in the caves 
 of the north, or had died, for this cause. 
 
 The mode of approach adopted was well fitted to throw Jesus off His 
 guard. Eecognition, even by Pharisees, as the brave, frank, fearless Mau 
 of God, and appeal to Him in a matter which might cost the questioner 
 his life, were alike ensnaring. Frankness demanded frankness. The cour- 
 age of the question called for as much in the reply. Jesus knew, besides, 
 that such ideas were always fermenting in the mind of the Pharisee youth, 
 and that the Herodians, instead of being friends of Kome, anxiously de- 
 sired a change. Wliy, therefore, should He distrust the new allies ? The 
 Eoman supremacy was undoubtedly, at bottom, a usurpation. The strict 
 Jew recognised no ruler but Jehovah, and since Jesus had devoted His life 
 to founding a " Kingdom of Heaven," it seemed only natural that He should 
 hold His followers free from obligations to the kingdoms of the world. 
 They could not comprehend the spirituality of His conceptions, for if they 
 had not cherished a secret hope, that, in spite of appearances. He really 
 meditated an attack on the Koman government, they would hardly have 
 asked such a question. Could they only bring Him to reveal these secret 
 thoughts, His death at the hands of the Eomans, as a crafty conspirator, 
 was certain, and the hierarchical party would get their revenge against 
 the daring and determined, transgressor of Rabbinical law, without the 
 odium of exacting it. 
 
 But Christ's answer scattered their subtle plans to the wind. 
 
 " You hypocrites ! — you actors ! " replied He ; " I see through your de- 
 signs, and value your deceitful flatteries at their worth. AYliy do you thus 
 seek to entrap me, under pretence of religious scruples which you wish me 
 to solve for you ? Bring me the coin you pay as the Roman tax." A Roman 
 denarius was presently brought Him— a coin which the Jew hated intensely, 
 for it was that in which the poll-tax was paid, and was, thus, the sign of 
 slavery to the heathen. Besides, it bore the idolatrous image of the Roman 
 Emperor Tibei'ius, and the legend of his authority. Till Vespasian's reign, 
 the Emperors, to spare Jewish feeling, had a special coinage for Judea, 
 without a likeness on it, but only the name of the Emperor and the tra- 
 ditional Jewish emblems. Other coins, however, stamped with the image 
 of Augustus or Tiberius, naturally found their way to Jerusalem, especi- 
 ally at the feasts. Such a piece was now handed to Jesus, with the hope, 
 
 I 
 
 I
 
 618 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 doubtless, that the double abomination— the idolatrous image on one side, 
 and the legend of Jewish subjection on the other— might provoke Him to 
 some treasonable expression. 
 
 " Whose image and superscription is this p " asked He, 
 
 " Ca3sar's." 
 
 " Ecnder then to Ca3sar the things that arc Cajsar's, and to God the 
 things that are God's." 
 
 JSTothing could be said after such an answer. The head of the Emperor 
 on the coin, and the legend around it, were overt proofs of the existing 
 state of things, and of the cle facto right of the imperial government to 
 levy taxes. Hence followed, not only the lawfulness, but the duty, of pay- 
 ing what was thus due to the Eoman exchequer, including the tax in ques- 
 tion, since the very coin in which it was payable showed, on its face, that 
 it was the lawful claim of the ruling power. " But," added Ho, " your 
 theocratic duty is in no way compromised by such political obligations. 
 Pay also what is demanded by God as your spiritual King, as a legal claim 
 of His government — the Temple tax and all that He demands from you 
 besides, as His spiritual subjects." The treacherous question was an- 
 swered with a clearness, precision, and wisdom, which defined for all ages 
 the relations of Christianity to the civil power. Its adherents were not to 
 oppose existing authority, but to unite their duty to it with their duty to 
 God. The political and religious spheres were declared not opposite but 
 co-existing and harmonious, though distinct. 
 
 To realize the immense significance of this utterance, delivered as it 
 was, on the moment without an instant's hesitation, we must remember 
 that it introduced an entirely new conception of the relation of Church 
 and State. Till then, over the world, they had been identical. The Caesar 
 was chief priest as well as emperor, and the colleges of priests and augurs 
 were political institutions. In Judea, the two spheres, henceforth to be 
 separated, had, hitherto, been confused and intermixed ; the civil power 
 was the instrument of the priest ; its institutions v/ere religious, and the 
 priesthood had striven after kingly power and rank. Henceforward, the 
 new Society was to stand apart from political interests and authorities. 
 The State was no longer indispensable to its perfect completeness and effi- 
 ciency. The sphere of religion was that of the conscience, which is, by 
 its nature, free. The State cannot leave the payment of its imj^ositions to 
 goodwill ; it must enforce them, if they be refused ; but force is uttei-ly 
 opposed to the idea of the Kingdom of God. In it, voluntary service alone 
 has value. What is yielded to force, without inner truth and love, is, be- 
 fore God, as if not given at all ; what is given in hypocritical self-interest, 
 is an abomination to Him. 
 
 No wonder such an answer filled the messengers of the hierarchical party 
 with astonishment. It was not only not treasonable, but indirectly pressed 
 on the nation the conscientious discharge of its duties to Eome. But they 
 could not grasp its whole significance, for they had no conception of a reli- 
 gious community which had not the right and power to inflict civil penal- 
 ties. The Old Testament economy was, itself, the State, Obedience to its 
 requirements was enforced by the national courts, and an attempt to change
 
 JERUSALEM. 619 
 
 or transgress them was severely punislied. Jesus, Himself, indeed, was 
 about to atone with His life for His offences against the established and 
 traditional religious usages and opinions of the ruling caste. The idea 
 of freedom of conscience and faith, which was the very starting-point of 
 His teaching, was a stumbling-block and a ground of bitterness to His 
 age. The conception of a religion in which there was no responsibility 
 except to God, was beyond it. 
 
 All the influential Jewish^ parties had now united against Him, as a 
 dangerous innovator, an enemy of the Eabbinical " hedge " of human pre- 
 scriptions and refinements, which was the essence of the religion of the day. 
 If tolerated longer. He might win over the people to favour His demand for 
 fundamental reform. The Pharisees and Herodians had hardly left Him 
 when some aristocratic Sadducees renewed the attack. The clergy of all 
 classes, from highest to lowest, were against Him. His support was among 
 the people. His appearance in the Temple, His assumption of authority 
 over it, and His lofty claim to be the Messiah, filled the official Avorld with 
 alarm, and united them to crush Him. But the Sadducees had none of 
 the earnestness of the Pharisees. They were the prototypes of the scoff- 
 ing and infidel priests whom Luther found, almost fifteen hundred years 
 after, in Eome ; who, while apparently consecrating the Holy Sacrament, 
 were parodying the words of the Office. The Pharisees had early taken 
 offence at Jesus, for they were zealots for the Rabbinism He attacked ; but 
 the Sadducees — few, rich, dignified ; the primate and bishops of the day — 
 affected at first only to despise the Galileean, who, like so many before 
 Him, had stirred up commotion for the time among His rude compatriots. 
 Even now, in Jerusalem, they were disposed to look at Him and His ad- 
 herents with a lofty contempt, and to laugh the foolish rabble who listened 
 to Him out of their fanatical dreams. His claims, were, in their opinion, 
 more silly than dangerous, and they would, therefore, bring the whole 
 matter into contempt, by making it ridiculous. 
 
 For this end they had carefully selected, from the cases invented by 
 Eabbinical casuistry, that of a wife who was supposed, in accordance with 
 the Mosaic law, to have married in succession seven brothers, each of 
 whom died without children. Though an imaginary, it was a possible 
 case, for the Law enacted, that, if a husband died without leaving a son to 
 perpetuate his name, his brother must marry the widow, and the first-born 
 son of this second marriage was to be entered in the public register as the 
 son of the dead man. 
 
 Not themselves believing in the doctrine of the resurrection, and sup- 
 posing that Jesus, who, they had heard, taught it, held the same notions 
 as they ascribed to the Pharisees, they fancied they could cover Him and 
 it with ridicule, by a skilful use of this case. Some of the Eabbis, indeed, 
 had purer conceptions than others, teaching that in the kingdom of the 
 Messiah, after the resm-rection, or at least in the future world, the just 
 would neither eat, drink, nor marry. But they were exceptions ; for the 
 popular belief, as expressed by the Eabbis generally, was gross and un- 
 worthy in the extreme. The resurrection would not only restore men to 
 their former bodies, but to their bodily appetites and passions ; they would
 
 620 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 not only eat, drink, and take -wives, but would rise in tlie clothes tliny wore 
 in life, if buried with them, and even with all their bodily blemishes and 
 defects, " that men might know them to be the same persons as they knew 
 in life." Even the case supposed by the Sadducees had been settled in 
 principle, — " for the woman who had married two husbands in this world," 
 Bays the Book Sohar, " in the world to come will be given to the first." 
 
 Fancying there was no sanction in the Pentateuch, either for the im- 
 mortality of the soul or the resurrection, the Sadducees sneered at both 
 doctrines. " They deny the resurrection after death," says the Talmud, 
 " and maintain that it is as vain to hope that a clou.d which has vanished 
 will appear again, as that the grave will give back its dead." 
 
 Coming to Jesus, with a well-bred politeness, they put their question 
 softly, addressing Him respectfully, in imitation of the Pharisees and 
 Herodians, as Rabbi, for which they iised the current Greek equivalent. 
 
 " Your ideas respecting these things are wrong," replied Jesus, " from 
 your not understanding correctly the Scriptures which refer to them. 
 The children of this world marry and are given in marriage, because they 
 are mortal, and marriage is necessary to perpetuate the race. But those 
 who shall be counted worthy to enter the Heavenly Kingdom of the Mes- 
 siah, and will be raised from the dead to do so, neither marry nor are 
 given in marriage, neither can they die any more, for they will be im- 
 mortal, like angels ; and hence there is no reason for their marrying and 
 raising children to take their place, as with men in this world. As sons 
 of the resurrection, they are sons of God, and, like the angels, will live 
 for ever. 
 
 " As to the resurrection of the dead, you have referred to Moses. But 
 let me also refer to him. Even he shows, in the passage in which we are 
 told of the vision at the burning bush, that the dead are raised. For he 
 calls Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now, God cannot 
 be the God of persons who do not exist, and, therefore, the patriarchs, 
 though their bodies were dead, must themselves have been still living — 
 living, I mean, in the separate state, and awaiting the resurrection. Thus, 
 God regards all the dead as still living, and, if this be the case, how easy 
 for Him to raise them hereafter ! " 
 
 " Eabbi, Thou hast spoken well," said some scribes, as He closed. They 
 were, for the moment, won to His side, by His triumph over their bitter 
 Sadducee enemies. Meanwhile, the people were more than ever astonished 
 at His teaching, and disposed to think Him a prophet. 
 
 It soon spread abroad that the Sadducees had been silenced ; but the 
 Pharisees had already prepared a new attempt to entrap Him. One of 
 them, who had listened to the dispute — a scribe, or Master of the Law- 
 had been selected to be their spokesman, but, as it proved, was only half- 
 hearted in His task. The Rabbis taught that there were great and small 
 commands in the laws — the one hard and weighty, the other easy and of 
 less moment. Their idea of greatness, however, was independent of the 
 religious importance of a particular precept, and was determined only by 
 their own arbitrary enactments. Thus, commands were especially called 
 great, to the transgression of which excommunication was attached ; such
 
 JERUSALEM. G21 
 
 fis observance of the Sabbath in their sense, of circnmcisiou, of the 
 minutest rites of sacrifice and offering, of ceremonial purity, and the like. 
 The precepts respecting the structure of the booths at the Feast of Taber- 
 nacles, and of the washing the hands, were, on the contrary, counted small. 
 But, in spite of this nominal difference, obedience to all was alike impera- 
 tive, and in practice, both classes were treated as alike weighty. To 
 honour one's parents and to let a mother-bird fly when the young are 
 taken, not to kill, and to wash the hands, were put on a level, and had an 
 equal reward. Even the injunctions of the Eabbis respecting the zizith 
 or tassels of their scarves, were " great." " The words of the Eabbis," 
 says the Talmud, " are to be prized al)ove tliose of the Law, for the words 
 of the Law are both weighty and light, but those of the Eabbis are all 
 weighty." Any answer of Jesus on a subject so delicate, might perhaps 
 once moi'e commit Him, as an enemy of the traditions, and expose Him to 
 new charges. 
 
 It may be, there was, besides, a lurking desire to elicit some utterance 
 respecting His claims to a more than human authority. Stones had been 
 lifted more than once, to put Him to death as a blasphemer, who made 
 Himself equal with God. How would He express Himself in the face of 
 the first command of the Decalogue ? 
 
 His reply, as always, goes to the root of the matter, simplifying the 
 whole sweep of " the Ten Words " into brief and easily remembered prin- 
 ciples. He avoided the least approach to anything that could offend the 
 most zealous supporter of the Old Testament, and, at the same time, gave 
 no handle for accusation of any slight of the Eabbinical precepts. 
 
 " Teacher," said the legalist, " which is the great and first command- 
 ment in the Law ? " 
 
 No one could take Jesus by surprise at any time, but in this sphere He 
 was, if we may so speak, especially at home, as He had shown a few days 
 before, in His conversation with the young ruler, near Jericho. Conscious 
 of the supreme peril of His position. He answered with more fulness than 
 usual, leaving no ground for misapprehension, but giving as little for 
 offence. To the young ruler He had named only one command — the love 
 of our neighbour— as gre:it, but to the scribe He gave two, as forming, to- 
 gether, " the great and first commandment." Neither was abridged, or sub- 
 ordinated to the other, and in the two He formed the principle from which 
 obedience of all the rest would follow. With sure hand, He turned first to- 
 the Fifth Book of Moses, then to the Third, for the two great guiding stars 
 which all the host of lesser commands followed. " Hear, Israel," said 
 He : " Jehovah, our God, is one Jehovah "—words in which every Israelite, 
 night and morning, confessed his faith in Jehovah — " And thou shalt love 
 the Lord Thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all 
 thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the great and first command- 
 ment. A second is like it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 
 There is none other command greater than these. On these two hang the 
 whole Law and the prophets." 
 
 He had once more shown His greatness as a teacher, by summing up 
 our whole duty in the fundamental conceptions of religion and morality; 
 
 I
 
 G22 THE LIl-'E OF CHRIST. 
 
 in the love to God, wliicli is also love to His children, our fellow-men. Nor 
 were the various commands of any part of the Scri])tures overlooked ; tho 
 religious and moral precepts of the jiropliets, no less than the Law, were 
 honoured and made binding for ever. 
 
 " Thou hast spoken well and truly," broke in the scribe, " for God is 
 One, and there is no other but He, and to love Him with all tho heart, and 
 with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, 
 and to love one's neighbour as one's self, is of greater consequence than all 
 the whole-burnt-offerings of the Law, the morning and evening sacrifice, 
 and all other sacrifices besides." 
 
 " Thou art not far from the kingdom of God," replied Jesus, as He heard 
 words which showed that the speaker was no mere man of his party, but 
 was accessible to higher impulses. The Galilaoan had proved very different 
 from what he had been led to anticipate. His answers had not only silenced 
 His enemies, but had half won some of them to His side. Henceforth, all 
 alike kept aloof from One who sent away chief priests and Eabbis equally 
 humbled and silenced. 
 
 As on the day before, the defeat of all the attacks on Him was followed 
 by His taking the offensive, but only in a mild, instructive coniiict with 
 prejudice and misapprehension. He had openly assumed the Messiahship, 
 though in a sense entirely in contrast with the popular conception. That 
 He fulfilled none of the conditions expected in the Messiah, alike by the 
 authorities and the people, had given the former the pretext for spreading 
 it abroad that He was an impostor ; a cry caught up, in the end only too 
 widely by the Jerusalem populace. He would now sliow the Pharisees, if 
 they chose to listen, that their preconceptions were wrong, when tested by 
 Scripture, and thus expose the worthlessness of the arguments on which 
 they had based their light denial of His Messiahship. 
 
 Turning unexpectedly to a knot of Pharisees, who hung near, to watch 
 as He was teaching, Ho asked them— 
 
 " "Wliat is your opinion about the Messiah ; I mean, as to His lineage and 
 extraction — whose son is He ? " 
 
 " The Son of David," answered they, at once. 
 
 "How is it, then," replied Jesus, " that David, in the hundred and tenth 
 Psalm, which you Eabbis justly refer to the Messiah, says, by inspiration 
 of God, ' The Lord said unto my Lord, the Messiah, Sit thou on my right 
 hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool. Thy mighty sceptre will the 
 Eternal stretch forth out of Zion ; rule thou in the midst of thy foes.' If 
 He be David's Lord, how can He be his Son ? " 
 
 ISTot knowing what to say, they were silent. The true answer was one 
 which had not entered their thoughts. It would have been — He is David's 
 Son by His human descent, but, as the Son of God, proceeding from the 
 Father, He is exalted far above David and all mankind, and therefore was 
 rightly called, by David, his Lord. Bub this twofold relation of the Mes- 
 siah to their great king, and, with it, the true estimate of the dignity and 
 office of the Messiah, were not in their theology. The exposition of Jesus 
 might displease the Eabbis, but it was heard with eager ears by the multi- 
 tude around.
 
 JERUSALEM. 623 
 
 A ncAV scene now opened. Day after day, the liostility of His enemies 
 liad shown itself more fierce, as they found it increasingly hopeless to over- 
 come Him by legitimate weapons or argument. The people, however, were 
 more friendly, and regarded Him as, at least, a prophet, if not the Messiah. 
 He had hitherto maintained only a defensive attitude, but the clear pur- 
 pose shown to put Him out of the way, made all further reserve or caution 
 useless. With the calmness of a j^rofonnd conviction, and the clearest 
 statement of His grounds, He proceeded to open a vigorous attack, that 
 the contrast between Himself and His opponents might be beyond ques- 
 tion. Every one must be enabled to judge intelligently on which side he 
 would take his place. A speedy decision of the struggle was, henceforth, 
 to be desired. 
 
 Jesus now, therefore, broke out, before the multitude, in a last terrible 
 denunciation of the moral and religious short-comings of His enemies. 
 These He summed up under the two great heads of hypocrisy and selfish- 
 ness ; they made a pretence and a gain of religion. Yet their doctrines 
 and decisions were substantially right ; it was their practice He con- 
 demned. 
 
 " The scribes and Pharisees," said He, '"' have taken possession of the 
 seat of Moses, to continue his office as law-giver, by explaining and teach- 
 ing the Law. They are his official successors ; therefore, obey their deci- 
 sions. But do not imitate their lives, for they teach what they do not 
 ])ractise. They heap together their rules and demands into heavy burdens, 
 and lay them on men's shoulders, but they will not help those whom they 
 thus load, by so much as the touch of a little finger. They shirk many 
 rites and forms which they demand from others as sacred duties. Their 
 requirements are a weight on the conscience, which deadens and destroys 
 it. To exalt their order, they make slaves of the people, paralyzing by 
 their countless laws, all true virtue, freedom, and love. They act only with 
 an eye to effect ; to be thought more religious than others, a^nd reap con- 
 sideration and profit from this reputation. They come 6ut to pray in their 
 most pious robes, especially now, at the feast, and wear phylacteries of 
 extra size on their forehead and arm that they may be noticed, while the 
 very tassels hung, in honour of the Law, at the corners of their abbas, are 
 larger than those of others. To get honour, they strive for the highest 
 jolaces at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and court saluta- 
 tions in the crowded market-place, and the sounding title, Eabbi. Have 
 nothing to do with such proiTd names, for I, only, am your Eabbi or teacher, 
 and all ye are brethren. They like to be called ' Father,' but call no 
 teacher on earth your father, for one only is your father — God, in Heaven. 
 And do not, like them, be called Leaders, for you have only one Leader, 
 me, the Messiah. The higiiest place among my disciples is quite otherwise 
 oljtained than among them, for he who seeks to be great among you can 
 become so, as I have said before, only by being the servant of the rest. 
 This lowliness is itself his greatness. For he who exalts himself shall be 
 humbled at my coming, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." 
 
 Rising, as He proceeded. He now Invoke out into a lofty utterance of in- 
 dignation at such ]U'iuciples and conduct.
 
 624 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 " Woe to you, scribes and Phainsees, actors ! Ye plunder the houses of 
 desolate -nddows, left without jirotectors, and to hide your doings, make 
 long prayers while at such work ! For you say in your hypocrisy, * Long 
 prayers make a long life,' and some of you boast that you pray nine hours 
 a day ! Believe me, you will receive for all this the greater damnation 
 hereafter. 
 
 " Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, actors ! Ye stand in the gateway 
 of the Kingdom of Heaven — that Kingdom I have come to set up — and not 
 only do not yourselves enter, but even close the doors I have opened, that 
 you may keep those from entering who wish to do so. 
 
 " Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, actors ! Instead of helping men 
 into the Kingdom of the Messiah, ye compass sea and land to make one 
 proselyte, that your party may profit by him, and, when he is gained, what 
 do you make of him ? A son of hell, by your example, and that twofold 
 more than even yourselves. 
 
 " Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ' If any one swear by the Temple, it 
 Is not binding ; but if he swear by the gold which belongs to the Temple — 
 the gilding, the golden vessels, or the treasure— he is bound by his oath.' 
 Fools and blind ! for which is the greater, the gold, or the Temple that 
 sanctifies the gold ? You say, in the same spirit, ' If any one swear by the 
 altar, his oath is not binding on him ; but if he swear by the gift that he 
 has laid on the altar, he must keep his oath.' Fools and blind ! for which 
 is the greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift ? He who 
 swears by the altar, swears by it and by all the things on it, and he who 
 swears by the Temple, swears by it and by Him that dwells in it. And he 
 who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by Him who sits 
 on it. 
 
 " Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, actors ! for ye affect to be so strict 
 in observing the Law that you pay a tenth to the Temple of even the sprigs 
 of mint and anise and cummin in j'our garden borders, and yet, at the 
 same time, you neglect the great commands of the Law, — to do justly, to 
 love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. You ought certainly to 
 attend to the lighter demands of the Law, but surely not to leave the far 
 greater neglected. Blind guides, who strain out the gnat from the wine 
 and swallow the camel ! Sticklers for worthless trifles, regardless of 
 matters of moment. 
 
 " Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, actors ! Ye make clean the outside 
 of the cup and the dish, but, within, they are full of robbery and inconti- 
 nence. Blind Pharisee, clean first the inside of the cup and dish, that the 
 wine taste no more of plunder and lust, and that the outside may not only 
 seem clean by your washing it, but he clean, by the taking away of that 
 defilement which your life gives it, in spite of your cleansings. 
 
 " Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, actors ! You are like the white- 
 washed tombs all over the land — fair outside, but full within of the dead- 
 liest uncleanness, the bones of men, and all corruption. You pass your- 
 selves off as religious, but in your hearts you are full of hypocrisy and 
 iniquity." 
 
 Over against the eastern hall in which Jesus now stood, and from which
 
 JERUSALEM. G25 
 
 He looked down into the Valley of the Kedron, lay, on the slope of the 
 Mount of Olives, the tombs of the Prophets, the southernmost of which is 
 yet known as the Tomb of Zechariah. In sight of these monuments, 
 ranging His eyes from grave to grave, He burst out afresh, — 
 
 " Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, actors ! Ye build tine tombs over 
 the old prophets, and beautify those of the saints, and say, ' If we had 
 lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them 
 in their martyrdom of these holy men.' But when you call them ' your 
 fathers,' you bear witness that you are their sons, and you are, not only 
 in natural descent, but in your spirit. You are of kin in heart to the mur- 
 derers of the prophets ! Fill up, therefore, the measure of iniquity your 
 fathers before you filled in their day, — by slaying me and those I shall 
 send to you ! Serpents ! brood of vipers, for vipers your fathers were, and 
 vipers are ye, how can ye escape the judgment of hell ! That ye may not 
 do so, behold I send to you prophet-like Apostles, and Rabbis, and scribes. 
 Some of them ye shall kill and crucify ; some ye shall scourge in your 
 synagogues, and persecute from city to city — that on you, the leaders of 
 the people, may come the punishment of all the innocent righteous blood 
 shed on the earth ; from the blood of righteous Abel to that of Zechariah, 
 the son of Berechiah, who was stoned by command of King Joash, in the 
 court of the Temple, between the shrine and the altar. Believe me, all 
 these things will come in this generation." Zechariah, of old, had denounced 
 the sin of Israel, as Jesus had that of the priests and Rabbis. " Why trans- 
 gress ye," he had asked, " the commandments of the Lord ? Ye cannot 
 prosper ! Because ye have forsaken Jehovah, He hath forsaken you." 
 
 " O Jerusalem ! Jerusalem ! He continued, " that killest the prophets, 
 and stonest those sent in love to thee ; how often have I desired to gather 
 thy children, as a hen gathers her chickens under her wing, and ye refused 
 to accept me as the Messiah, and thus come under my loving protection. 
 Behold, your house is left to you ! I go from it. The time of the Divine 
 help and guard over you and your city, which I was sent to offer, is past. 
 
 " I tell you ye shall not see me henceforth, after my death, which is near 
 at hand, till I appear again in my glory. Then, you shall be only too eagerly 
 willing to hail me as the Messiah, though now ye refuse even to let others 
 thus honour me. Then, when too late, you will cry, as the crowds did as I 
 entered your city, ' Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.' " 
 
 Thus, the breach between the Future and the Past was finally made 
 complete. The whole hierarchy, from the high priest its primate, to the 
 Levite its curate, and the Rabbi its university professor or tutor, had been 
 denounced before the people, in language which they must resent if they 
 were to retain any authority at all. Either Jesus, or the Church as it was, 
 with all its innumerable personal interests, must perish. It had come to 
 this, indeed, before this last tremendous indictment of the system, and the 
 certainty that nothing could avert His being sacrificed to the fana- 
 ticism and vested interests arrayed against Him, had alone caused such a 
 protest. He had no reasons for further reserve. It was evident that He 
 must die at their hands, and the irreconcilable opposition between the 
 system for the sake of which He was to be martyred, and His own char- 
 
 s s
 
 626 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 acter and work, must, once more, for the last time, be brought out in full 
 contrast, that every one might choose for which he would decide. 
 
 The infinite moral grandeur and purity of Jesus, His absolute truth, 
 His all-embracing love, His lowly humility. His sublime consecration to 
 the will of His Father, His intense moral earnestness. His spirit of joyful 
 self-sacrifice for the moral and spiritual good of mankind, shine out no- 
 where more transcendently, than when contrasted in this parting lament, 
 with the wretched soi^histrics and reverence for the infinitely little, which 
 marked the Rabbinism He opposed. The spirit of the market or the 
 booth, in religion, found no sanction at His hands ; He would have no 
 huckstering for heaven by a life of petty formalities ; He abhorred all cant 
 and insincerity, and all trading with religion ; all striving after mere out- 
 ward success, for ulterior and unworthy ends. He would have no divorce 
 of religion from morality ; it was with Him a living principle in the heart, 
 not a rubric of external acts ; its outward expression was a holy life, but 
 the holiness without was only the blossoming of a similar holiness within. 
 In Rabbinism, on the contrary, there was formal piety, with no moral 
 I earnestness ; an absorbing zeal for artificial duties, with which the 
 i conscience had nothing to do ; and an elaborate multiplication of rules and 
 I rites, for the express aim of obtaining the absolute spiritual dependence 
 ' of all on the teaching caste. The whole system had been originated and 
 developed to its fulness, to be a "hedge" round the Law, and thus secure 
 fidelity to the politico-religious constitution of the nation, and its minutest 
 details were strenuously enforced to secure this end. Unquestioning 
 acceptance of tradition, and the deepening and extending of the ghostly in- 
 fluence of the authorities, were the two great points kept in view. There 
 were true Israelites, like Nathanaol, or Zechariah, or Simeon, or Joseph, 
 in spite of a system thus lifeless and corrupting ; but it was vain to hope 
 for anything but evil in the community at large, under its reign. Insin- 
 cerity and immorality in the teachers of a religion can only multiply and 
 perpetuate themselves in their disciples. 
 
 The theology and hierarchy of Judaism had become, in fact, what Jesus 
 openly declared them — whitewashed sepulchres, pure to the eye, but with 
 death and corruption within. They had proved that they were so, by 
 rejecting Him, because He demanded moral and religious reform. "Wedded 
 to the false and immoral, they rather killed Him than let Him lead them 
 back to God. 
 
 Over such a state of things He could only raise His sad lamentation ! 
 Judaism had chosen its own way, and left Him to His. 
 
 CHAPTER LVII. 
 
 THE INTERVAL. 
 
 A FTER His terrible parting denunciation of the religious leaders of 
 -^-^ the nation, Jesus passed into the spacious Court of the Women, 
 fifteen steps below that of the men. It was a wide space of a hundi-ed and 
 thirty-five cubits in length and breadth, and was open to the people at
 
 THE INTERVAL. 627 
 
 large. Popular assemblies, indeed, were at times lield in it, and it was 
 the scene of the torch-dance at the Feast of Tabernacles. It was especi- 
 ally frequented, however, by both sexes, because the building in which the 
 pious presented their offerings formed part of one of its sides. 
 
 After the multiplied excitements of the past hours, Jesus had sat down 
 to rest over against the treasiay, where the continuous stream of persons 
 casting in their money necessarily attracted His notice. As each came, 
 He could judge by his appearance how much he threw in. The poor could 
 only give paltry copper coins, but the rich cast in gold and silver; some, 
 doubtless, from an honest zeal for the glory of God ; others, because alms, 
 in the sordid theology of the day, had their commercial value in the future 
 world. 
 
 Among the rest, came a poor widow, with her two lepta — one-twelfth of f 
 our penny, each — the smallest of copjier coins. She could not have cast 
 in less, for one lepton was not received as an offering. The sight touched 
 the heart of Jesus. " Believe me," said He, to those around, " this poor 
 woman has cast in more than any one, for they have only given of tlieir 
 superfluity, but she, in her need — for she has less than enough — has 
 thrown in all she had for her day's living." 
 
 Among the multitude of festival pilgrims, then in Jerusalem, were many 
 foreign proselytes. That they should have come up, though heathen by 
 birth, showed an earnest sincerity, for it exposed them to ridicule, and 
 even worse, from their own countrymen. Many of them, doubtless, like 
 the centurion at Capernaum, or like the Ethiopian eunuch, were men won 
 over to faith in Jehovah, and to a loyal respect for the great doctrines of 
 the Old Testament ; proselytes of the gate, in distinction from, the pro- 
 selytes of righteousness, who, by circumcision, had, in all religious and 
 social respects, become Jews. The spread of a Jewish population in all 
 countries, and the immunities they enjoyed, had resulted in the conversion 
 of great numbers of Gentiles, who were willing to pledge themselves to 
 what were called the seven commands of Noah — the avoidance of murder, 
 bloodshed, or robbery ; obedience to the Jewish courts in matters of re- 
 ligion ; the rejection of idolatry, and the worship of Jehovah ; and to eat 
 no freshly killed and still bleeding flesh. They were received as " the 
 strangers within the gate " of Israel, and could attend the sjaiagogues, but 
 could not pass beyond the Court of the Heathen, in the Temple. 
 
 Of this class, some Greeks, then at Jerusalem for the Feast, which they 
 were in the habit of attending, had hea,rd much of Jesus ; jaerhaps had 
 seen Him and listened to His discourses, and were anxious to know Him 
 personally, from their interest in what they had heard. Too modest to . 
 come direct, they applied to Philija, the only Apostle bearing a Greek I 
 name, though Andrew is of Greek origin. To him Philip forthwith men- 
 tioned the circumstance, and the two communicated it to Jesus. It filled 
 His heart with much-needed joy, to welcome men v/ho must have seemed 
 to Him an earnest of His future triumphs among the great heathen nations. 
 As Bengel says, " it was the prelude of the transition of the kingdom of 
 God from the Jew to the Gentile." 
 
 He went out, therefiu'e, to the Court of the Heathen, where they were
 
 G28 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 standing, and cheerfully gave them the audience they desired. The inci- 
 dent brought to His mind, with fresh vividness and force, the nearness of 
 His death, through which His salvation was to be brought to the l)eathen 
 world at large, and His emotion broke forth in words, full of sublimity. 
 
 " The hour has come," said He, lifting His face, att-we may believe, to 
 heaven, as he spoke, " the hour appointed in the counseJs of my Father, 
 from eternity, when the Son of man shall enter into His glory by death. 
 For it must be that I die, that my work may bear its dae fruits — as the 
 grain must fall into the ground and perish, that it may bring forth the 
 harvest. Verily, verily, I say to you, it must be so. My life remains 
 limited and bound up in myself, as the life is in the seed, till I die. It 
 cannot, till then, pass beyond me to others, and multiply. But when I 
 die, I shall be like the corn, which, in its death, imparts its life to what 
 springs from it. 
 
 " As it is needful for me thus to die, to make my work triumph, so also 
 is it for you, my followers, in your own case. He who so loves his life as 
 not to be willing to yield it for my kingdom, will lose eternal life here- 
 after ; but he who, in this world, cheerfully gives up even his life for me, 
 as if he hated it in comparison with loyalty to me, will gain life everlast- 
 ing. If any man wish really to serve me, let him imitate me in my joyful 
 readiness even to die ; and he will receive, as his reward, that where I go, 
 to the right hand of my Father in heaven, there, also, will he follow, and 
 dwell with me ; for if any one thus truly and self-sacrificingly serve mc, 
 my Father will honour him by giving him the glory of the life hereafter." 
 
 The awful vision of the immediate future, meanwhile, for a moment, 
 raised a shrinking of human weakness. It was the foreshadowing of 
 Gethsemane. 
 
 " Now is my soul troubled," cried He, with a voice of infinite sadness. 
 In his agony of soul. He faltered for a moment at the thought of all 
 through which He had so soon to jiass, as if He were even now enduring 
 it. "What shall I say?" He added, as if communing with Himself; 
 " Shall I pray— Father, save me from the hour of darkness ; take this cup 
 from me ? No, let it not be ; all the past has been only a progress towards 
 it, that by it I might glorify Thy name ! " The momentary human shrink- 
 ing from the Cross had passed away as soon as it had risen. The cloud 
 that dimmed the clear Heaven of His spirit had disappeared. His trouble 
 of soul gave place, on the instant, to the victorious consciousness of the 
 great future to flow from His accomplishment of the purpose of God for 
 the salvation of the world. Then, as if He were repeating aloud His in- 
 ward thoughts. He burst forth into the words — "' Father, glorify Thy name, 
 as Thou hast purposed, through my death for man. I come to do Thy will, 
 God; I give myself up to Thee ! " 
 
 Forthwith came a wondrous attestation, sealing the Divine authority of 
 our Saviour's mission with the stamp of august and transcendent glory. 
 Suddenly there sounded a voice from the cloudless April sky, with a 
 volume that filled the heavens, so that some, overpowered by its grandeur, 
 could not think of it as an utterance of articulate words, but fancied that 
 it thundered — " I have glorified My name, already, in having sent Thee,
 
 THE INTEEVAIi. G29 
 
 and in all Thy sinless and gi-acious life, till now ; and I shall glorify it again, 
 by Thine entrance on Thy heavenly glory through the gates of death ! " 
 
 " It thunders," muttered some, whose souls were least quick to realize 
 what had happened. *' No," said others, with truer religious sensibility, 
 '' It was an angel speaking to Him. He is a prophet, at least ; if not the 
 Messiah Himself, and God speaks thus to Him by a heavenly messenger." 
 But the discijiles around, and Jesus Himself, knew whence it came, and 
 what were the precise words from the Excellent Glory. 
 
 " You may not understand," said Jesus to the disciples and the crowd, 
 " whence this voice comes, and why it is sent. It is the voice of my Father 
 in heaven, and comes, not for my sake, but for yours, to take away your 
 unbelief, and to strengthen your faith. The time presses for your decision 
 regarding me. Even now, the judgment of my Father is being given forth, 
 against those who have rejected me as the Messiah. Through the victory 
 of my kingdom, — which my death will secure, and the spread of my name 
 over the earth proclaim,— the impotence of my enemies will be shown, and 
 their guilt before God be made clear. He, especially, whom even you call 
 the ruler of this world, and the great enemy of the kingdom of God— the 
 prince of evil — will feel the greatness of my triumph, for his kingdom 
 must yield to mine. My death, as the atonement between God and man, 
 will deliver from his power, and place under my protection, as the glorified 
 Shepherd of the sheep, all who believe in my name. Nor will that triumph 
 cease as time rolls on ; age after age, till the last day, in ever wider sweep, 
 it will subdue all things under me, and drive the kingdom of darkness 
 from the world. 
 
 " So it shall be ; for I, if I be lifted up from the earth by the death of 
 the cross, as I know I shall be, and thus pass away from the world and 
 return to my Father, shall draw all men to me ; for the power of my cross 
 will be universally felt, and the Holy Spirit, whom I shall send from the 
 Father, will turn men's hearts to love and serve me. The prince of this 
 world has, in me, his conqueror ; for I must reign till all things are put 
 under my feet, and the world be won back to God." 
 
 The people round, accustomed to speak freely with the Eabbis on the 
 subject of their addresses, had listened to Him respectfully, but were at a 
 lo§s to reconcile His words with their preconceived ideas of the Messiah. 
 In the synagogue, they had heard passages read from the Scriptures, de- 
 scribing Him as a priest for ever, and His dominion as one which should 
 never pass nway or be destroyed, but stand for ever and ever, and had 
 come to expect, in consequence, an everlasting reign of the Messiah upon 
 earth. They were at a loss, therefore, to reconcile Christ's use of the 
 name, Son of man, which they applied to the Messiah, with the statement 
 that instead of dwelling on earth for ever, as a king over all nations, He 
 should suffer the shameful death of crucifixion. The cross was already 
 the stumbling-block to them it afterwards became so widely to their 
 nation. 
 
 " We have heard out of the Law," said they, " that the Christ is to live 
 for ever, on earth. What dost Thou mean, then, by saying that the Son of 
 man — a name by which we understand the Christ — must be crucified ?
 
 630 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 WIio is this Sou of man to whom Thou roferrcst ? What dost Thou mean 
 by using this name, when Thou speakest so contrary to Scripture ? " 
 
 His time was too short to give a formal exphination. Nor woukl it have 
 been of any effect in minds so prejudiced, for the fullest statements of 
 after days made no impression. He cliosc rather to urge on them, once 
 more, the one course in which lay their eternal safety. Standing at the 
 very close of Plis public ministrations, He threw into these last words of 
 warning the whole intensity and earnestness of His soul. 
 
 " If you wish to comprehend what I have said about ray being lifted up, 
 let me tell you how all your questions and difficulties about it may be re- 
 solved. I shall be with you only a very little longer; make right use of that 
 time to believe in me, the Light of the World, as the traveller makes use 
 of the last moments of day, to reach safety, before darkness overtake him. 
 With mc, the light of truth, which now lights you, will be gone, and you 
 know that he who walks in darkness knows not which way to go. While 
 ye have mc, the Light of Men, believe in the light, that ye may receive 
 illumination from it." 
 
 It was still early in the afternoon, and He might have stayed in the 
 Temple till it shut at sunset, then a few minutes after six in the evening. 
 But these were almost the last words He was to speak as a public teacher. 
 His mission to His nation was ended. There remained only a brief inter- 
 val of communion with the loved ones round Him, and then would come 
 the consummation of Calvary. His work was over, except its final and 
 gi'eatest act. Casting a last sad look of quenchless pity on all. He 
 turned away to Bethany, to seek seclusion, till the time came for His self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 It must have been a solemn and well-nigh overpowering moment, thus 
 to bid fai'cwell, for ever, to the Temple of His nation, the centre of the old 
 kingdom of God; for the retrospect of His public life, and the vision of the 
 future, must have risen, like a dream, before Him. So far as apparent 
 results went. He had had little success, for though even His bitterest 
 enemies were forced to own His supernatural power, and the greatness 
 and number of the instances in which it had been shown — though His 
 grand self-restraint, which always exerted that power for others, but 
 never for any personal end, either of ambition, defence, or retaliation, was 
 recognised so fully that tliey ventured to treat Him, not only with dis- 
 respect, but even with open violence, secure in His infinite patience and 
 humility — their prejudices had utterly blinded them, and they steadfastly 
 refused, as a class, to accept, in His person, a Messiah so contrary to their 
 gross and ambitious expectations. There were, indeed, even among the 
 chief rulers and priests, many who believed in Him, but it was only a 
 secret conviction Vi^hich they had not the courage to own. 
 
 The tlireat of excommunication had been too terrible to brave, and they 
 preferred to cling to their social and civil interests, at the cost of repress- 
 ing their better thoughts. 
 
 Once more, only, was the pleading voice raised. A number of those 
 near apparently followed Him as He retired, and He could not tear Him- 
 self from them, -without a final outburst of yearning desire for their sal-
 
 THE INTERVAL. 631 
 
 vation. Turning I'ound, and raising His voice till the sound rang far and 
 wide, He cried, — ■ 
 
 " Think not that the faith I demand in myself in any way lessens or 
 takes from the faith that is due to God. To believe in me, and to believe 
 in God, are the same thing. He who has that faith in me, which the 
 proofs I have given of my being sent from God demand, believes not so 
 much in me as in Him who sent me. And thus, also, he who looks on me 
 as that which I have shown myself to be, looks not so much on me as on 
 Him who sent me — on the Godhead of my Father revealed in me. In me 
 ye have a Light. I came into the world to enlighten men, that every one 
 who yields himself to my guidance, may be as Vi^hen one walks after a 
 light, and may no longer remain in the darkness of ig-norance, superstition, 
 and sin. 
 
 " Yet if any one who hears my words, refuses to believe in me — let him 
 not think that I shall inflict judgment on him for his refusal. The end of 
 my coming is not to judge the world, but, rather, to save it from eternal 
 ruin. He who rejects me, my words, and my deeds, has in his own breast 
 a judge that will condemn him hereafter. The truth I have spoken, in the 
 name of God, which he has refused to receive, will condemn him in his 
 own conscience at the last day, and will condemn him also from the lips 
 of the Great Judge. For the words I have spoken have been no mere 
 utterances of my own ; I have taught only that which I was commissioned 
 by my Father to speak, and I know that my teaching, if obeyed and 
 followed, secures everlasting life to men. All that I say is only what my 
 Father has told me to speak in His name. Therefore, let no man think 
 that I speak anything but that which my Father has given me to proclaim. 
 I am He whom God hath sent, and my words are the words of God." 
 
 Nothing in these last discourses of Jesus had seemed more strange and 
 inexplicable to the Apostles, than His prediction of the early destruction 
 of Jerusalem, and of the Temple itself. As they now passed with Him 
 through the forecourts, to the outer gate, and down the eastern steps, to 
 the Kedron Yalley, overpowered by the vast magnificence, which seemed 
 grand enough even for the times of the Messiah, they could not refrain 
 from speaking to Him respecting His strange and mysterious words. 
 
 " Master," said they, " see what a wondrous structure this is. "What 
 stones ! what buildings ! what splendour ! what wealth ! How the whole 
 Temple rises, terrace above terrace, from the great white walls, to the Holy 
 Place, shining with gold ! and it is not finished even yet ! " 
 
 The Temple, says Josephus, was built of white stones of great size — the 
 length of each about thirty-seven and a half feet, some even forty-five 
 feet, the thickness twelve feet, and the breadth eighteen. 
 
 But Jesus looked at all this strength, wealth, and magnificence, with 
 very different eyes. To Him the Jewish Theocracy had outlived its day, 
 and had sunk into moral decrepitude and approaching death, which the 
 mere outward splendour of its Temple could not hide. Israel, in rejecting 
 Him, — the Voice of God, calling it to rise to noAv spiritual life,— had shown 
 itself ripe for Divine judgment. His own death, already determined by the 
 ecclesiastical authorities, and now close at hand, would seal the fate of the 
 
 \
 
 632 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 nation and its religion. It would be the proclamation of the passing away 
 of the Kingdom of God on earth, from Jndaisra now dead in forms and 
 rites, to the heathen nations willing to receive its spirit and liberty. 
 
 He knew that the Theocracy would cling to their dream of national in- 
 dependence, and the erection of a mighty political empire of the Messiah, 
 and that this involved a struggle between them and Kome, in which their 
 petty weakness must inevitably be crushed. Strange fate ! the moment when 
 they fancied they had secured themselves even from reform by the reso- 
 lution to put Jesus to death, was that in which He whose violent end was 
 to ensure permanence and prosperity, predicted their utter destruction ! 
 
 "Yes," said Jesus, in utter sadness, "I see all: they are very great 
 buildings ; but I tell you solemnly, the day will come when there will not 
 be one stone of them all left on another, not thrown down." 
 
 He said nothing more, but went out of the city by the blossoming 
 Kedron Valley, with its gardens and stately mansions, a picture of peace 
 and prosperity, to the Mount of Olives. Sitting down on a knoll, to enjoy 
 the magnificent view, so full of unutterable thoughts to the Eejected One, 
 the Apostles had Moriah once more before them in its whole glory, crowned 
 by the marble Temple, like a mountain with snow. 
 
 In the group around, Peter and James, and John and Andrew, sat near- 
 est their Master, and as they looked at all the splendour before them — 
 splendour so great that it was often said that he who had not seen it had 
 missed one of the wonders of the world — their thoughts still ran on the 
 words in which He had doomed it to destruction. They had heard Him say 
 that the nation would not see Him again, till they showed themselves ready 
 to receive Him as the Messiah, and that, in the meantime, the city and 
 Temple should be utterly destroyed. Their only idea of the Messiah, even 
 yet, however, was that of a deliverer of their race, who, besides any spiri- 
 tual benefits He might confer, would raise Israel to world-wide supremacy. 
 They could not imagine that the Holy City and its Temple would perish 
 before the end of the world, and He must surely come sooner than that, to 
 free the land from subjection, and inaugurate its glory. The destruction of 
 the city, therefore, could not, they fancied, be befoi'e the destruction of all 
 things. They would fain know what sign, after this catastrophe, would 
 precede His glorious coming and the final consummation, if it were to be 
 so, that they might recognise His advent when it took place. Their ideas, 
 in truth, were in a hopeless confusion. 
 
 " Tell us. Master," said one of the four favoured ones, " when shall these 
 things, of which Thou hast spoken, take place ? And what sign will there 
 be of Thy coming, and of the end of the world ? " 
 
 It was impossible to explain this to minds so filled with preconceived 
 ideas. Much must happen— His death, resurrection, and departure from 
 the earth before they could acquire just conceptions of His kingdom. Till 
 then, nothing could remove their prejudices. He, therefore, confined 
 Himself, as usual, to the practical, that He might rouse them to watch- 
 fulness over themselves, and destroy the illusion that the holiness of 
 Jerusalem would preserve it, and that the Messiah must appear first, to 
 deliver the nation from the hand of the Romans.
 
 THE INTERVAL. 638 
 
 He fitly began by warning them against false Messiahs. " Take heed," 
 said He, " that no impostor deceive you, by persuading you that he is the 
 llessiah, come, as you expect, to free the nation and subdue the woi'ld, and 
 to spread the Jewish religion over the earth. Many deceivers will rise, 
 calling themselves the Messiah, sent from God to restore Israel, and say 
 ing that the time of its deliverance has come. They will mislead many. 
 Take care that you go not out after them. 
 
 " Biit to turn to your question : before the Temple is destroyed, you will 
 hear the terrors of wars near at hand, and the distant tumult of others, 
 and you may think that they will bring the end. But be not alarmed. 
 They are divinely appointed, and this may serve to calm your minds ; but 
 the destruction of the city and Temple will not take place so soon. ISTor 
 must you think that these wars will herald national deliverance; instead of 
 proclaiming an interference of God for the restoration of Israel, they mark 
 the beginning of His judgments. For nation will rise against nation, and 
 kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines, and pestilences, and 
 earthquakes, and fearful sights in the heavens, here and there, over the 
 earth. Yet do not think, from these, that God is about to appear for the 
 Jews, and to send them an earthly Messiah. No ; all these are only the 
 first pangs of the coming sorrow. Your Rabbis have told you that such 
 things are signs of the speedy advent of the Messiah, but be not deceived. 
 
 " Instead of peace, these things will bring evil. Once more, be on your 
 guard. I shall soon go away, and would again warn you of the dangers 
 which shall precede the last catastrophe. I have often announced what 
 perils and heavy trials await you, in founding and spreading my Kingdom, 
 so different in its spiritual and moral unworldliness, from all others. Before 
 the end comes, men will proceed to violence against you, for my name's sake. 
 Your countrymen will lay hands on you, accuse you, and bring you before 
 the local authorities ; you will be scourged in the synagogues and thrown 
 into dungeons, and even dragged before kings and Roman governors, that 
 you luay witness for me, my Person, and my work, before them. 
 
 " But let me comfort you, in prospect of such trials. Never forget that 
 I will not forsake you when you thus suffer for my sake, and will, myself, 
 by the Holy Spirit whom I will send to your aid, give you words and wis- 
 dom for your defence, when you are before tribunals. Be not therefore 
 anxious, when such persecutions rise, for in the hour of your trial it will 
 not be you who speak, but the Holy Ghost. 
 
 " Yet, let me not conceal from you that they will deliver you up to every 
 form of suffering, and even kill you, and that you will be hated not only by 
 your own nation, because you proclaim me as the Messiah, but by all the 
 lieathen nations as well. In this world you can look only for tribulation. 
 
 " But a greater trial awaits you than mere persecution from without. 
 Tlie strife of creeds will enter even the sacred circle of the family ; the 
 father will give evidence before the Courts against his own child, the 
 brother against the brother, the child against the parent, the friend against 
 the friend. The fury of the heathen and Jewish fanaticism will feel no 
 pity, the nearest blood will rage against its own, and will deliver them up 
 to the executioner. And even in your own number, many will renounce
 
 634 THE LIFE OF CIIIIIST. 
 
 their faith, under the pressure o£ persecution and trial, and will even 
 betray and deliver up their fellow-Christians to the magistrate, and hato 
 those from whom they have thus apostatized. My name will indeed be- 
 come a symbol of hatred and scorn against every one who confesses it. 
 Still worse, many false Christian teachers will rise in your own midst, and 
 will mislead numbers. And all this spiritual corruption will sap the 
 brotherly love and religious zeal of many of my followers, for true Chris- 
 tian life cannot thrive where there is moral decay. 
 
 " But he who neither renounces my name, nor lets himself be led astray 
 by false teachers, but remains true and loyal to me till the evil daj's are 
 over, will receive everlasting honour at my final coming. Such good and 
 faithful servants need have no fear of losing their reward, for nothing can 
 befall them, to hurt or lessen, in the least, their share in the salvation my 
 eternal Kingdom will bring. As regards that, they are perfectly safe. 
 ITot a hair of their head, if I may so speak, will perish, so far as their 
 heavenly hopes are concerned. Their faithfulness will gain for them the 
 eternal life of their souls, even should they die as martyrs here. 
 
 " Meanwhile the Gospel of the new Kingdom of God will be preached 
 throughout the whole world, that a testimony respecting me may be given 
 to all nations, however they may hate you. Then, but not till then, shall 
 come the end of this present state of things— the old will then pass away, 
 and the new begin. The reign of the kingdom of God will open when 
 Judaism has fallen, and heathenism has heard its doom. 
 
 " The full spread of my Kingdom cannot come so long as that which it 
 is to displace still stands in Jeriisalem. The Gospel needs new soil, new 
 means, new powers. The old religions are so identified with the civil and 
 political life of men, with their customs and modes of thought, that my 
 Kingdom can hope to found its peaceful reign only after great and terrible 
 revolutions and disturbances. The way will be opened for it by war, with all 
 its horrors, and by the widespread judgments of God on the world at large. 
 
 "When, therefore, ye see Jerusalem compassed with armies, it will mark 
 the beginning of the end. When you see the holy place in ruins, and 
 desolation reigning there in its hatefulness, as is spoken of in Daniel, let 
 him who is in Judea flee to the hills of Gilead, where he will be safe ; let 
 him who is on the house-top not come down to take away his things from 
 the house, but let him flee along the flat roof, to the town wall, and thus 
 escape ; and let him v/ho is working in the field, where he has no outer 
 garment, not come back to his house to get it, but let him flee for his life. 
 But woe to those who are with child in those days, and cannot flee, and to 
 those who have children at the breast, and are kept from escaping by 
 vainly trying to save them also. Pray that your flight be not in the 
 winter, with its rains and storms and swollen torrents, nor on the Sabbath 
 day, when he who still clings to Jewish law will think it unlawful to travel 
 more than two thousand cubits. Whatever hinders your swift flight will, 
 indeed, be cause of regret, for the troubles of those days will be great 
 beyond example. 
 
 " There will be terrible distress in the land, and the fierce wrath will be 
 let loose on this nation. Its sons will fall by the sword, and be led off, ta
 
 THE INTEEVAL. 635 
 
 be sold as slaves over tlie whole earth, aiA Jerusalem will be trodden under 
 foot of the heathen, as a captive is by his conqueror, till the times allowed 
 by God to the Gentiles, to carry out thus His avenging wrath, be fulfilled. 
 
 " And, indeed, if the number of these evil days had not been shortened, 
 in God's pitying mercy, no flesh would be saved. But for the sake of the 
 chosen ones of the Kingdom of the Messiah, whom God has determined 
 to save from the calamities of these days and preserve alive, they have 
 been shortened. 
 
 " But when the Temple has been laid waste, and you have fled for your 
 lives, false Messiahs, and men pretending to be prophets, and to speak in 
 the name of God to the nation in its affliction, will rise once more, taking 
 ftdvantapis of the commotion and anxiety of those days, and will be so 
 much the more dangerous. V/hen men say to you, of any of these, ' The 
 Messiah has appeared here,' or ' He has appeared there,' do not believe it. 
 They will pretend to perform such great signs and wonders, that even the 
 chosen ones of my Kingdom— my disciples — would be deceived if it were 
 possible. I have warned you of this already, but press on you once more 
 to take heed to it. If, therefore, any one say to you, ' Behold, the Messiah 
 is in the wilderness,' do not go out with him ; for they draw their dupes 
 to tlie desert as a safe place for mustering them. If any say, ' Behold, he 
 is in such and such a house, shut up in his secret chambers,' do not believe 
 it. My visible and final coming, respecting which j'ou ask me, will not 
 be such that men need point to this place, or to that, to see me ; it will be 
 like the lightning, which shines with instant splendour through all the 
 sky, and announces itself beyond mistake. For, from east to west, the 
 earth will, in that day, be ripe for the judgments of the Messiah, and as 
 the eagles gather wherever the carcase is, so the Son of man, then the 
 minister of Divine wrath, will reveal Himself to all who have fallen under 
 His condemnation. 
 
 " Then, in a future age — when the time of the Gentiles, of which I have 
 spoken, is fulfilled — when he vfho has prayed long and unfaintingly, like 
 tlie importtmate widow, will begin to wonder if ever he will be heard — I 
 do not say whether in the second watch, or in the third, or even in the 
 morning ; when the bridegroom has tarried while his attendants wait long- 
 ingly for him — when the unfaithful servant has encouraged himself by 
 the thought that his lord delays his coming — when the Gospel has been 
 preached to all the Gentiles— and when the king may be expected, at last, 
 from the far country to which he has gone — then, suddenly, like the flood 
 in the days of Noah, or the destruction of Sodom, shall the words of the 
 prophets be verified, and earth and heaven be veiled, and darkened, and 
 tremble, before the great coming of the Son of man, to judgment. And 
 then shall they sec the sign of His appearing, respecting which you have 
 asked — the far-shining splendour around Him, like the sun in its strength 
 — when He descends in the clouds of heaven, with power and with great 
 glory. And He shall send fofth His angels, from the midst of the un- 
 utterable light ; and the gi^eat trumpet of God, which will wake the dead, 
 shall sound, and the angels will gather together around Him all who are 
 His — chosen of God to be heirs of the heavenly kingdom of the Messiah^
 
 636 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 from north, and south, and east, and Avcst, over the Avhole world. And all 
 the nations of the earth who have rejected me shall mourn, when they seo 
 me thus come in Divine majesty. And when these wondrous signs begin, 
 then lift up your heads, for your eternal redemption from all the afflictions 
 of time is at hand. 
 
 " When, therefore, soon after my departure from you, ye see all these 
 wars, and hear all these rumours of wars of which I have told you, know 
 that I, the Messiah, am near in my first coming, as ye know that the 
 summer is close, when ye see the branches of the fig-tree, and all other 
 trees, swell, and put forth their buds and tender leaves. For it is I who 
 come, unseen, to judge Jerusalena and the Temple, as I shall, in the end 
 come visibly to judge all mankind. 
 
 " Verily I say to you. This generation of living men shall not have passed 
 away, before the beginning of the age of the Messiah has come, — ushered 
 in by the fall of Israel, and to be closed by all these signs ; when the old 
 world shall have drawn to an end, and my Kingdom — the new age of the 
 world — shall take its place till the consummation of all things. Heaven 
 and earth shall one day pass away, but my words shall not, for all I have 
 told you must happen. The signs I have predicted, as heralds of my 
 coming to judge Jerusalem and Israel, will assuredly be seen by some of 
 you now round me. And my coming then will be the revelation of my 
 Kingdom before the world, aiid of its triumi^h over its present Jewish 
 enemies, for it can only, then, truly rise, when the Temple has been de- 
 stroyed. When it shall lie strewn in ruins, and desecrated for ever by 
 heathen soldiery, the world that is will be seen to have passed away. There 
 will be an end of the old priesthood and sacrifice, and the earth will be 
 opened to the victory of my spiritual reign. 
 
 " But the exact time of the last period of all, of which I have spoken — 
 the destruction of all things visible, the resurrection of the dead, and my 
 return in glory, to judge the nations— I cannot tell you. Even the angels 
 do not know it, nor even does the Son ; it is known to my Father alone 
 This uncertainty of the time of my coming will make men secure and care- 
 less, as tliey were in the days of Noah. For they went on, dreading no 
 catastrophe, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and 
 neither believed nor dreamed that the flood would really happen, till it 
 came, and swept them all away. Like it, my coming will be so sudden, 
 that, of two men in the field, one shall be taken by the angels sent forth to 
 gather the saints, and the other left— for they will have no time to flee ; 
 and, of two slave-girls at the household mill, while they are still grinding, 
 the one shall be taken, in like manner, to be with me, and the other left. 
 
 " Take heed to yourselves, and watch, lest at any time, liia the people 
 before the flood, you give way to sinful pleasures or indulgences, or be 
 engrossed in the anxieties of life, so as to be careless, and unprepared for 
 my return, and that day come on you, as the flood did on them, unawares. 
 For it will burst on all that dwell on the face of the whole earth, as suddenly 
 and unexpectedly as the snare flies over the creature caught in its toils. 
 
 "Take heed, I repeat, and watch; for ye know not when the hour may 
 arrive. It will be like the coming of a man who has taken his journey
 
 THE INTERVAL. 637 
 
 into a far country, and has left his house in the hands of his servants, and 
 given authority over it to them, to each his own si^ecial work, and has 
 commanded the keeper of the gate to look for his return. Watch, there- 
 fore, like faithful, diligent servants, for ye know not the hour when I, the 
 Master of the House, shall come, whether it will be in the evening, or at 
 midnight, or at cock-crowing, or in the morning ; lest, if I come suddenly, 
 I find you asleep. And what I say to you, my Apostles, I say to all, Be 
 awake and watchful at all times, that ye may be able to escape all the 
 terrors of my coming, by being found faithful, and thus may be set before 
 me by the holy angels, to enter into my glory, and stand before me, as my 
 servants, in my heavenly kingdom. 
 
 " You know how a householder would have acted had he known before- 
 hand at what watch of the night the thief would come, to plunder his 
 goods. He would have watched, and not have suffered his house to be 
 broken into. Therefore, be ready at all times, for the Son of man will 
 come, when, perhaps, ye least expect Him. 
 
 " Who among you will prove himself a good and faithful servant ? He 
 will be like a servant of him of whom I have spoken, who took his journey 
 to a far country — a servant set over the household to give them their food 
 in due season, during his absence ; who faithfully did it. Blessed will be 
 that servant, whom his lord when he returns shall find so doing ! Verily 
 I say to you, he will advance him to a far higher post, for he will set him 
 not only over the food of his household, but over all his substance. And 
 blessed in like manner will he be whom I, on my return, shall find faithful 
 to the charge committed to him in my kingdom ! 
 
 " But if, instead of being faithful, you fail in your duty, you will be like 
 a servant of the same master, who should say in his heart, ' My Lord 
 delays his coming,' and begin to beat his fellow-servants, and to eat and 
 drink with the drunken, at his master's cost. The lord of that servant 
 will come in a day when he does not look for him, and in an hour when 
 he does not expect him, and will punish him to the uttermost, and make 
 him bear the just fate of a hypocrite. Even so, the hypocrite, in my king- 
 dom, shall be cast out into outer darkness. And, oh ! what weeping and 
 gnashing of teeth will be there ! 
 
 " In that day of my final coming it will be as when, at a marriage, the 
 maidens invited to play and sing in the marriage procession, prepare to 
 go out to meet the bridegroom, to lead him to the house of the bride, 
 where the marriage is to be celebrated. Let me suppose there were ten 
 such maidens — five wise, five foolish. The five foolish ones took their 
 lamps with them, to help the display, and lighten the path of the bride- 
 groom, but they forgot to take oil with them, besides, to refill the lamps, 
 when they had burned out. But the wise not only took their lamps, but 
 oil in their oil-flasks as well. All the ten, thus differently pi-epared, went 
 forth from the home of the bride, and waited in a house, on the way by 
 which the bridegroom must come, to be ready to go out and escort him, 
 when he passed. 
 
 " But he delayed so long that they all grew heavy, and fell asleep. At 
 last, at midnight, they were suddenly roused; for the people in the streets
 
 638 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 had heard the loud music and shouts, and had seen the light of the lamps 
 and torches of the ]:)rocession, afar, and raised the cry at the doors, — ' Tiie 
 bridegroom is coming, go ye out to meet him.' Then they all arose, and 
 trimmed each her own lamp, to have it ready. The foolish ones now found 
 that their lamps were going out, because the oil was all burned, and asked 
 the wise ones to give them of theirs. But they answered, 'Wo cannot 
 possibly do so, for our oil would assuredly not suffice both for ourselves 
 and you ; go, rather, to the sellers, and buy for yourselves.' 
 
 " While they were away buying it, however, the bridegroom came, and 
 the five who were ready, joined the procession, and went in with the 
 bridegroom to the marriage and the marriage-feast, and the door was shut. 
 After a time, the other five came, and knocked at the gate with anxious 
 entreaty, ' Lord, lord, open to us.' But he answered, ' I do not know you. 
 You were not among the other maids of the bride in the procession, and, 
 therefore, you are strangers to me, and as such have nothing to do at my 
 marriage.' 
 
 " Learn from this parable that they who patiently watch and wait, doing 
 the duty I hfive assigned them, till I come, though they know neither the 
 day nor the hour when I shall do so, will have a part in the joys of my 
 heavenly kingdom.. All my followers will then be, as it were, my bride, 
 and I their bridegroom ; but those who are not faithful and true to the 
 end, will be shut out from the marriage-feast." 
 
 The Apostles and the others who followed Jesus had been sitting long 
 in the cool of the evening on the pleasant sloiie of Olivet, listening to this 
 wondrous discourse, but their Master's stay with them was now nearly 
 over, and He was loath to bring His words to an end. He still went on, 
 therefore, and next repeated to them the parable He had before delivered 
 near Jericho — of the talents lent by the Lord to his servants. Its awful 
 close, however, which represents the Tinprofitable servant as cast into the 
 outer darkness, with its weeping and gnashing of teeth, brouglit before 
 Him all the terrors of the last judgment, and led Him to close by a picture 
 of that awful day, unequalled for sublimity by any other, even of His 
 own utterances. 
 
 "The parable of the talents, my beloved," said He, " shows that every 
 one of you must needs make the utmost possible use, for the interests of 
 my kingdom in your own hearts and among men, of all the different gifts 
 entrusted to you by me, for my service, according to your respective 
 abilities. For, at my coming, I shall reckon with you all, and those who 
 have been faithful to me shall receive high rewards in heaven, but those 
 who have left their gifts, however small, unused, will have those gifts 
 taken from them, and they themselves will be thrust out of my kingdom." 
 
 He then proceeded, in words such as no mere man could ever dream of 
 using, words which we seem to hear spoken with the light as of other 
 worlds shining from the speaker's eyes, and a transfiguration of His whole 
 appearance to more thair human majesty. 
 
 "I have told you how I shall return invisibly, to earth, before this 
 generation shall have passed away, to judge Jerusalem and Israel, when 
 the cup of their iniquity shall be full ; and how, also, I shall come again.
 
 THE INTERVAL. 639 
 
 in spiritual unseen presence, to be with my servants in their warfare with 
 the powers of darkness, till my kingdom passes from victory to victory, 
 through succeedmg ages, and the prince of this world be finally cast down 
 from his usurped throne, and the world become the kingdom of God and 
 of me, His Messiah. 
 
 " Then shall arrive that day which I have warned and urged you so 
 earnestly to keep ever in mind, the day when, like the lord who returned 
 from the far country to reckon with his servants, I, the Son of Man, now 
 poor, despised, with none round me but you — rejected by my brethren of 
 Israel, and in a few hours to be nailed on a cross like the meanest slave — 
 will come again as Head of the great kingdom of the Messiah, which will 
 then embrace all nations. 
 
 " The father has committed all judgment in this kingdom, to me, His 
 Son, and has given me all power in it in heaven and in earth. And at 
 that day I shall come in my glory, as its Prince and Head, amidst the 
 splendours of heaven, and with all the angels of God. 
 
 " Then will I sit on the throne of my glory, as kings of the earth when 
 they sit to judge, and all nations shall be gathered together before me, 
 by my ministering angels, and I will separate them, one from another, as 
 you have seen a shepherd separate the white sheep from the black goats, 
 and I will set the sheep on my right hand, but the goats on my left. 
 
 " Then, as King, coming in the majesty of my assembled Kingdom, 
 shall I say to them on my right hand : ' Come, ye blessed of my Father, 
 inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the earth — 
 that kingdom which I promised as the inheritance of the meek. For ye 
 have proved that ye truly believed in my name, by the love towards me 
 and mine, which only sincere faith can yield. For I was hungrj^ and ye 
 gave me to eat ; I was thirsty,, and ye gave me to drink ; I was a stranger, 
 and ye gave me welcome ; naked and ye clothed me ; I was sick, and ye 
 visited me ; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.' 
 
 " Then shall the righteous, feeling only their shortcomings, and forget- 
 ting their good deeds, think it cannot be as I have said. ' "When, Lord,' 
 they shall ask me, ' saw we Thee hungry, and gave Thee maintenance ; 
 or thirsty, and gave Thee to drink ? When saw we Thee a stranger, and 
 gave Thee welcome ; or naked and clothed Thee ? Or when saw we thee 
 sick, or in prison, and came unto Thee ? ' 
 
 " And I, the King, will answer them : ' Verily I say to you, Inasmuch 
 as ye did it, for my sake, to one of these my brethren, even the least of 
 them: the poor, the lowly, the outcast, the persecuted, the wretched, who 
 believed in me, and are now round my throne — or to one of the least of 
 all my brethren of mankind, for the love ye bore me, who died for them — 
 ye did it unto me.' 
 
 " Then shall I also say to those on my left hand : ' Depart from me, 
 accursed, into the evei-lasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels, 
 but now to be shared by you, his servants. For I was hungry, and ye 
 did not give me to eat ; I was thirsty, and ye did not give me to drink ; 
 I was a stranger, and ye would not receive me ; naked, and ye did not 
 clothe me ; sick, and in prison, and yc did not visit me.'
 
 GIO THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 " Then they will try, vainly, to justify themselves, by pleading innocence. 
 ' Lord,' they will say, ' when did we see Thee hungry, or thirsty, or a 
 stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to Thee ? 
 Lord, we never saw Thee thus, and, therefore, have never refused Thee 
 our service.' 
 
 " But I will answer them : ' Verily I say to you. Inasmuch as ye did 
 it not to one of the least of these, my brethren, whom you had with you 
 and might have helped, ye did it not to me. Ilad ye truly, and not in 
 name only, believed in me, ye would have shown fruits of your faith, in 
 deeds of love for my sake.' 
 
 " And these shall go away into everlasting punishment ; but the right- 
 eous into life eternal." 
 
 CHAPTER LVIII. 
 
 FAUEWELL TO FRIENDS. 
 
 IT was the twelfth day of the new moon, now rounding to fulness, 
 when the last words had been spoken in the Temple, and farewell 
 taken of it for ever. Jesus had hitherto lingered in its courts till the gates 
 closed, at sunset, after the evening sacrifice, but His soul this day was 
 filled with immeasurable sadness. Israel would not hear the words which 
 alone could save it, and, by its representatives, had not only rejected and 
 blasphemed Him, but was even now plotting His death. He had left the 
 Temple courts, therefore, in the early afternoon, to spend some hours with 
 the little band of followers He was so soon to leave. They had sat on the 
 slope of the Mount of Olives, facing the Temple and the city. He had 
 passed quietly and unheeded through the stream of pilgrims and citizens, 
 and had been resting, during His long discourse, in the privacy of His 
 own circle, beneath one of the fig-trees of Olivet, gazing, with full soul, at 
 all He had left for ever. Had they known it, the high priests and rulers 
 would have seen, in His final abandonment of " His Father's House," a 
 portent more awful than any their superstitious fears were even then 
 noting. For, forty years before the destruction of the Temple, and there- 
 fore, in the very days of our Lord's public life, it had been seen, with 
 unspeakable alarm — if we may trust the Talmud — that the hindmost lamp 
 of the sacred seven-branched candlestick in the Holy Place, one night 
 went out ; and, that the crimson wool tied to the horns of the scapegoat, 
 which ought to have turned white when the atonement was made, had 
 remained red ; and " the lot of the Lord," for the goat to be offered on the 
 Day of Expiation, had come out on the left hand ; and the gates of the 
 Temple, duly shut overnight, had been found open in the morning. A 
 generation later, it was to be told, with pale lips, among the heathen, that 
 when the Temple was near its fall, a more than human voice had been 
 heard from the Holy of Holies, crying, " The gods have departed," and 
 that presently, a great sound, as of their issuing forth, had been heard. 
 
 But the true hour of Jehovah's leaving it, and that for ever, was when 
 His Son passed that afternoon through its gates, to re-enter them no more.
 
 FAllEWELL TO FRIENDS. 641 
 
 Rising aftei' He had ended His discourse on the near and distant future, 
 He, who a moment before had anticipated the hour when He should come 
 amidst the clouds of Heaven, to jndge all nations, attended by all the 
 angels, and robed in the splendours of the Godhead, was once more the 
 calm, lowly Teacher and Friend, climbing the slope with His handful of 
 followers, on the way to the well-loved cottage at Bethany. 
 
 As they went, He again broke, to those around Him, His approaching 
 fate. " You know," said He, " that after two days is the Passover, and 
 that the Son of man is app ointed, by the eternal counsels of God, to be 
 delivered over to His enemies, to be crucified." It was the second time 
 He had expressly used that word of unspeakable degradation and infamy 
 to men of His day — Tue Cjioss. But though they heard it again, they could 
 not even yet realize so disastrous an eclipse of their cherished dreams. 
 
 Meanwhile, his enemies were not idle. It was now Tuesday evening, 
 and nothing alarming had followed the popular demonstration of the pre- 
 ceding Sunday. The multitude, indeed, disappointed by seeing no signs 
 of the national movement they had expected that day to inaugurate, had 
 lost their enthusiasm, and, in many cases, grown even hostile. There was 
 less to fear than the authorities had apprehended. Yet, the crowd was 
 fickle, and thousands of Galilteans, the countrymen of Jesus, were at the 
 feast, which was always so restless a time that the Roman Procurator kept 
 a double garrison in Antonia while it lasted, and himself exchanged the 
 congenial society of Cassarea for Jerusalem, with its hated bigotry and 
 muffled treason. Even the governor- general of the province sometimes 
 indeed thought it worth his while to be present. The fiery Galilseans 
 might rise if Jesus were apprehended during the feast-Aveek, and any 
 tumult would be certain to bring severe measures, at the hand of the 
 Romans, on the community at large. 
 
 The heads of the priesthood and of the Rabbis were hence in a difficulty, 
 and met to consult on the wisest course. The acting high priest, Joseph, 
 known among the people as " Caiaphas," " the oppressor," was the soul of 
 the movement against Jesus ; for his memorable words, " Why not this one 
 man die, rather than the nation ])erish p " had first given definite expression 
 and formal sanction to the idea of putting Him to death. Throwing all 
 his official dignity into the plot, he put the upper court of his palace, in 
 the Upper City, at the disposal of those engaged in it, and there they and 
 he met, to consult how they might get the Hated One into their power 
 without the knowledge of the people, or fear of a rescue, in order to hand 
 Him over to the Romans for crucifixion. The meeting could not, however, 
 come to any fixed plan, from dread of a popular rising. No more could bo 
 done than watch, and take advantage of the course of events. 
 
 While murder was thus being discussed in the halls of the primate, 
 peace and sacred friendship reigned in the pleasant home at Bethany. 
 The house of Simon, once a leper, but cured by Jesus ; now the abode of 
 Martha, perhaps his widow, perhaps his daughter ; of Mary, her sister, 
 and of Lazarus, so strangely brought back from the unseen world— the 
 one man raised from the dead of whose second earthly life we know any 
 incident— was a scene of tender respect and loving homage. To do Jesus 
 
 T T
 
 642 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 honour, the family had made a supper for Him, -witli invited guests, and 
 Lazarus reclined with Him on the table-couch. Besides Christ and His 
 immediate followers, the company consisted, doubtless, as in the case of 
 the little household itself, of such as owed their health, perhaps their life, 
 or that of some friend, to His miraculous powers. 
 
 It Avas, in itself, a tender proof of reverent love, that at such a time, 
 T/hen the life of their guest was sought by the authorities of the Temple 
 and Schools, and every one was required, on pain of high displeasure, to 
 help them to arrest Him, He should have been thus honoured ; for Beth- 
 any was close to Jerusalem, and the act might have brought disaster on a 
 family, known, like that of Martha and Mary, to the dominant class. But 
 a still higher tribute was paid Him ; touching and delicate, beyond ex- 
 pression, under the circumstances. The sisters had often pondered how" 
 they could show their gratitude for all He had been and all that He had 
 done for them. He had healed Simon, and had given not only him, Init 
 the sisters and their brother, the hope of Heaven, by winning their souls 
 to Himself, and, but now. He had shown how truly He was the Messiah, 
 by bringing back Lazarus from the grave. They knew that the shadows 
 of death were gathering over their Mighty Benefactor Himself, for the 
 disciples, doubtless, repeated to them the depressing intimations He had 
 made. Mary was left to give their love and gratitude expression. 
 
 It w-as common to anoint the heads of the Rabbis who attended marriage 
 feasts, with fragrant oil, and special guests were sometimes similarly 
 honoured. A grateful penitent had at an earlier period anointed even the 
 feet of Jesus Himself, washing them, moreover, Avith her tears, and wiping 
 them with her hair, flowing loose, in self-forgetfulness. But now, Mary 
 outdid all former honour paid Him. The costliest anointing oil of anti- 
 quity was the pure spikenard, drawn from an Indian plant, and exposed 
 for sale throughout the Roman Empire, in flasks of alabaster, at a pi"ice 
 that put it beyond any but the wealthy. 
 
 Of this Mary had bought a flask, containing about twelve ounces' weight, 
 and now, coming behind the guests as they reclined, opened the seal, and 
 poured some of the jierfume, first on the head and then on the feet of 
 Jesus, drying them, presently, with the hair of her head, like her prede- 
 cessor. She had rendered a tribute than which she could have given no 
 higher to a king ; but it was a worthy symbol of the rightful devotion of 
 all we have and are, to Christ, and, as such, was lovingly accejited by Him. 
 The act, however, raised different thoughts in some of the narrow minds 
 around. As the fragrant odours filled the room, voices were heard muttering 
 that expense so lavish for such an object was wrong. " This ointment," said 
 one, " should have been sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor. 
 That would have been a worthy act ; but this — ! " It was Judas Iscariot. 
 
 With that perfect gentleness and repose which He always displayed in 
 such circumstances, the answer of Jesus showed no resentment, to hurt 
 the feelings of any, but yet must have carried joy to the tender heart that 
 had felt its highest offering too little to bestow on such a guest. 
 
 " Why do you blame and trouble her p " said He to the company, especi- 
 ally to Judas. " Let her alone. It is a good deed she has done in my
 
 FAREWELL TO FRIENDS. 643 
 
 honour. You have tlie poor with you always, and you cau never want an 
 opportunity of showing kindness to them, if you wish. But you have not 
 me always with you. Mary, as if she knew I was soon to die, has chosen 
 the strongest way she could of showing how much she loved me. She has 
 done for me, as her Teacher, Messiah, and Friend, while I still live, what 
 she would soon have had to do to my dead body — she has embalmed me 
 for the grave. What remains will do for the day of my burial. I tell you, 
 wherever the gospel shall be preached in the whole world, what she has 
 done will also be told for a memorial of her." 
 
 Judas, the only southern Jew in the Twelve — the one among them 
 brought up, as it were, under the shadow of the Temple — must have lis- 
 tened with the bitterest feelings to such praise of an act so hateful to him. 
 He had been with Jesus at least from the first appointment of the Apostles, 
 and must, even then, have been conspicuous as a disciple. The good seed 
 of Christ's words had sprung up in his heart, as in those of the others in 
 those early days ; but the evil, also, small and unnoticed, perhaps at first, 
 had been let spring up erelong, and it had grown to rank strength that 
 slowly choked all else. Like his brethren, he had cherished gross and 
 selfish views of the prospects to be opened for them by their Master. If 
 some of them were to be the high officials in the expected World-Monarchy, 
 he had trusted to get, at least, some post ; profitable, if less splendid. In- 
 deed, the lowest dignity promised inconceivable honour, for were not all 
 the Twelve to sit on thrones to judge the Twelve Ti'ibes of Israel .P In the 
 minds of the others, the dream was loyally subordinated to love and duty 
 to the Master ; in his, self seized and held, abidingly, the first place. The 
 mildew of his soul had spread apace. Trusted with the common purse of 
 the brotherhood, into which passed the gifts of friends, to meet the humble 
 expenses of each day, the honour, sought at fiu'st perhaps in all upright- 
 ness, became a fatal snare. His religion withered apace. Once a disciple 
 from honest anxiety, he continued one in outward form, from sordid 
 motives. Gain became a passion with him, till, under the very eyes of his 
 master, he embezzled, as treasurer, the petty funds in his hands. 
 
 The entry to Jerusalem had kindled his hopes, after many chagrins and 
 disappointments, for the popular excitement promised to force on Jesus 
 the part of a K'ational Messiah. But, blind, to His own interest, as Judas 
 must have thought Him, He had thrown away the splendid opportunity. 
 Instead of allying Himself with the dignitaries of Judaism, and inaugurat- 
 ing a mighty Jewish uprising, with high priests and chief Eabbis as His 
 supporters. He had assailed both Temple and School, and proceeded to 
 open rupture with them. Instead of a crown, He had spoken of a cross ; 
 instead of honours for His followers, He had foretold persecutions and 
 martyrdom. To the mean and selfish heart of Judas, the bounty of Mary 
 had sufficed to kindle smouldering resentment and disloyalty to a flame. 
 If ruin were certain, he would profit, if he could, before all was over. If 
 Jesus must fall into the hands of His enemies, he might as well get money 
 by what was unavoidable. Had not He, argued the diseased spirit, dis- 
 appointed him ; led him about, for years, in hopes of gain in the end ; and 
 had He not, now, told him that the only inheritance he could expect was
 
 644 THE LIFE OP CHRIST. 
 
 poverty and suffering ? He Tvoiild go to the cliief priests, and see what 
 could Ije done. 
 
 Stealing out, therefore, with guilty thoughts, from the quiet cottage, 
 perhaps when all its inmates were sunk in sleep ; unmoved hy the Divine 
 love and purity of his Master ; forgetful, in the blindness of his evil ex- 
 citement, of all he had seen and heard through the last three eventful 
 years, he made his way, in the darkness of night, to the Temple. The 
 watch was at its post at the gates and on its rounds, but Judas found 
 means to reveal his object to the captain in charge, and was admitted. 
 The officers hastily gathered to learn Avhy the stranger thus rudely dis- 
 turbed the night. " I come to betray Jesus of Nazareth," muttered Judas. 
 " He had better be taken to the chief priests," replied those addressed. 
 Some of the council were hastily summoned forthwith, and received his 
 overtures with a joy that brightened their faces, even by the dull light of 
 the night-lamps— for it was clear that a cause so righteous as that of the 
 Galiljean, could never give them open and honest grounds for His arrest. 
 Treason must come to their aid from within. So they bargained with 
 him ; meanly enough, indeed ; for they offered for his villiany, if success- 
 ful, only thirty shekels of the Sanctuary — the price of a slave. But the 
 covetousness of an Oriental was fascinated even by so j^altry a bribe. Ho 
 sold himself as their tool, and from that time sought a favourable oppor- 
 tunity to betray Jesus, when the people were not round Him. 
 
 The next day, our Thursday, was the fourteeenth of ISTisan, on which 
 labour ceased at noon. Before then all leaven had been removed from 
 every house, in preparation for the Passover in the evening. Towards 
 sunset, the Passover lamb was killed in the forecourts of the Temple, by 
 any one chosen to do so, and the blood and fat burned on the altar as an 
 offering to God. The rest supplied the materials for the feast, an hour or 
 two later, after the beginning of the fifteenth day at sunset. The four- 
 teenth was, therefore, very busy for the whole of Jerusalem ; for both it, 
 the villages round it, and the open country, were filled with countless 
 thousands, all intent on the same observances. 
 
 The Passover had been founded to commemorate the departure from 
 Egyjit, but its date permitted the union with it of the feast of first-fruits, 
 to celebrate the opening harvest, and it was also called, from rites con- 
 nected with it, the feast of unleavened bread. 
 
 We are not told how Jesus spent Wednesday, for the supper in the house 
 at Bethany was on Tuesday evening. He apparently stayed in privacy^ 
 awaiting the coming day. 
 
 On Thursday morning the disciples, taking it for granted that He would 
 celebrate the feast with them, came to Him early to receive instructions. 
 Would He keep it, as He legally might, in Bethany, for the village was 
 counted by the Eabbis part of Jerusalem for religious usages, and the lamb 
 might be eaten in Bethany, though it must be killed at the Temple. It 
 Avas generally bought on the tenth Nisan, according to the rule of the 
 Law ; and though the strict enforcement of this command was not main- 
 tained, Jesus was careful to fulfil all the innocent duties prescribed. 
 
 No doubt the disciples expected that Bethany would be chosen, for He
 
 FAREWELL TO FRIENDS. 645 
 
 had solemnly turned away from Jerusalem, two days before, and to go 
 thither again would be to put Himself in the power of His enemies. But 
 He had resolved once more to visit the city so dear to Him. It was the 
 place appointed by the Law for the feast, and He would there be in the 
 midst of the rejoicing multitudes, as Himself a son of Israel. He wished, 
 also, to throw a greater sacredness over the institution He designed to 
 inaugurate that night as the equivalent, in the New Kingdom of God, of 
 the Passover in the Old. It was well to link it in the minds of the 
 Apostles with the sacredness of the Temple, under whose shadow, with 
 the City of the Great King, in whose bounds, and with the gathering of 
 Israel, in whose midst, it was founded. 
 
 Turning, therefore, to Peter and John, His usual messengers. He told 
 them to go and prepare the Passover, that He and the Twelve might eat 
 it together. " On entering the city," said He, " you will meet a man bear- 
 ing an earthen jar of water ; folloAV him into the house he enters, ask for 
 the master, and say, ' The Teacher told us to ask you, " Where is the 
 room intended for me, in which to eat the Passover with my disciples ? " ' 
 And he will himself show you his guest-chamber, on the upper floor, pro- 
 vided with couches, ready for us. Get the supper prepared for us there." 
 
 The two started at once, and foiind everything as Jesus had said, and 
 by evening all was in readiness to receive Him and the Ten. Who it was 
 that thus entertained Him is not told us. It may have been John Mark, or 
 perhaps Joseph of Arimathea, the eai"ly scholar, and the friend after death. 
 The Gospels do not say, and even tradition is silent. Universal hospi- 
 tality prevailed in this matter, and the only recompense that could be 
 given was the skin of the paschal lamb, and the earthen dishes used at the 
 meal. Not fewer than ten, but often as many as twenty — enough, in any 
 case, to consume the entire lamb — could sit down together; but Jesus 
 wished to have none but His Apostles with Him, that He might bid them 
 a final, tender farewell. Women were not commonly present, and indeed 
 were excluded by many ; but, apart from this, the evening was designed 
 as a time of deepest communion with the trusted Twelve alone, and hence, 
 neither the outer circle of disciples, nor the ministering women who had 
 lovingly followed Him from Galilee, were invited. 
 
 Peter and John had had much to do beforehand. It may be, the lamb 
 was yet to be bought that morning, for its purchase on the tenth had fallen 
 rather out of use. They had to choose, from the countless pens in which 
 the victims were offered for sale, a male lamb of a year old, without 
 blemish of any kind. In Galilee, no secular work was done all day ; but, 
 at Jerusalem, it ceased only at noon. About two, the blast of horns 
 announced that the priests and Levites in the Temple were ready, and the 
 gates of the inner courts were opened, that all might bring their lambs 
 for examination, and might satisfy the priests as to the number intending 
 to consume each. Forthwith, the long lines of household fathers, servants, 
 disciples of the Eal)bis, and others, and, among the rest, the two Apostles 
 deputed by Jesus, pressed across the Court of the Men, which was gaily 
 ta])estried and adorned, to the gate of the priests' court, the lamb on their 
 shoulders, Avith a knife stuck in the wool or tied to the horn.
 
 646 THE LIFE OF CHKIST. 
 
 About half-past two the evening offerhig was killed, and about an honr 
 after it was laid on the great altar. Foi'thwith, three blasts of the 
 trumpets of the priests, and the choral singing of the great Hallel by the 
 Levites, gave the signal for the slaughter of the Passover lambs, which 
 had to be finished between the hours of three and five. As many officers 
 were admitted as the courts would hold, and then the gates were shut. 
 Heads of families, or servants deputed by them, killed the lambs, and the 
 priests, in two long rows, with great silver and gold vessels of curious 
 shape, caught the blood and passed it to others behind, till it reached the 
 altar, at the foot of which it was poui'ed out. The victims, hung on the 
 iron hooks of the walls and pillars of the courts, or on a stick between the 
 shoulders of two men, were then skinned, and cut open ; the tail, the fat, 
 the kidneys, and liver, set apart for the altar ; the rest, wrapped in the 
 skin, being carried home from the Temple towards evening. As the new 
 day opened, at sunset, the carcass was trussed for roasting, on two 
 skcAvers of pomegranate wood, so that they fonmed a cross in the lamb. 
 It was then put in a hole in the ground, and having been covered with an 
 earthen oven without a bottom, was roasted in the earth. The feast could 
 begin immediately after the sun set and the appearing of the stars, on the 
 opening of the fifteenth of ISTisan, which was proclaimed by fresh trumpet 
 blasts from the Temple. 
 
 Judas had stolen back to Bethany before daylight, that his absence 
 might not be missed, and, after another day's bitter hypocrisy, under the 
 burning eyes of his Master, followed Him, with the other Apostles, to 
 Jerusalem, in the evening. They must have breathed heavily in the 
 troubled air, for presentiments of unknown dangers filled every heart. 
 They still clung to their old dream of a visible earthly kingdom of God, 
 under their Master, but their spirits must have sunk within them as they 
 passed through the vast multitudes, wholly absorbed in the approaching 
 feast, with no sign of preparation for a national Messianic movement, and 
 along the illuminated streets, in which no one took notice of them. That 
 the hierarchy had denounced Jesus was, itself, enough to fill their simple 
 minds with dismay, for its splendour and power seemed reflected in the 
 myriads assembled from the whole world, to honour the faith and the 
 Temple, of which they were the public representatives. And was not the 
 tiara worn by a fierce Sadducee ? "Were not the governing families ex- 
 clusively of this cruel and inhuman party? As they passed under the 
 shadow of the Temple, with its gleaming lights, its mai-ble bastions, and 
 its immemorial traditions, they must have felt that, unless Jesus chose at 
 last to do what He had never yet done, even for a moment — unless He 
 used His supernatural power in self-defence and for self-aggrandisement 
 —they were hopelessly lost. 
 
 To Jesus Himself the moment was unspeakably solemn. His scarcely 
 founded Kingdom was about to pass through the severest trial. The 
 temporary and earthly in it were to be violently separated, for ever, from 
 the heavenly and eternal. All hoioes of a worldly kingdom, so deeply 
 rooted in the minds of His followers, were to be destroyed, and He, the 
 visible Head of the Kingdom, to be apprehended, dishonoured, and cruci-
 
 FAREWELL TO FEIENDS. 
 
 647 
 
 fied. The thoughts of His disciples were to be raised from the idea of a 
 Messiah present with them, to a Messiah in heaven, to appear, henceforth, 
 no more, but by His return from the invisible world. To be true to Him, 
 meant, from this time, the realization of a spiritual conception as yet un- 
 attained by even the most enlightened of the Twelve. 
 
 But Christ was in no degree turned aside or paralyzed in His resolution 
 by such dangers. "While in no sense courting death, and even wishful, if 
 it pleased His Father, to escape its attendant horrors, He moved towards 
 the appointed and foreseen end, with sublime self-possession and holy 
 peace of soul, recognising all that yet remained for Him to do, and doing 
 it with a Divine serenity. His bearing to the great world to the last, His 
 action and His self-restraint, are alike wonderful ; but it must strike us 
 still more, as we observe it closely, how He acted in the circle of His chosen 
 ones as the catastrophe pressed nearer and nearer. 
 
 When the Twelve, with their Master, had entered the room, to take tiieir 
 places on the cushions, for the meal, the greatness of the change yet to be 
 wrought on their minds was once more strikingly shown. In spite of all 
 He had said, the question of precedence was uppermost in their thoughts. 
 
 As the head of the group, Jesus naturally took the first place on the 
 highest couch — the outermost, on the right of the hollow sriuare ; His face 
 towards the second place ; His feet outwards. Eesting His left elbow and 
 side on a cushion the whole breadth of the couch, His right hand was thus 
 
 Middle Couch. 
 
 
 Highest. 
 
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 rti-rlicst. 
 
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 Teicli.viuit. 
 
 free, while the Apostle next Him reclined so that his head lay, as it wore 
 in his Master's bosom. It had been the custom, in ancient times, to eat 
 the Passover standing, but the Eabbis had changed it for the Gentile prac- 
 tice of reclining. It was like slaves, t'lcy said, to eat standing, and as 
 Israel was not a race of slaves but of free men, they should eat the feast 
 reclining; a flattery so pleasing to the natural arrogance that even the 
 poorest adopted the new mode.
 
 648 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 But this Jewish pride in the Apostles, made still more fierce by selfish 
 ambition, in prospect of the political glory they still perversely hoped for, 
 could ill brook to take a lower place than others. It was a grave matter 
 for them, as for the Pharisees, who should have the higher seats, for, in 
 their delusion, they assumed that it might affect their future position in 
 the Messianic State, to be founded, as they dreamed, presently. So the 
 strife that had broken out on the other side of Jericho, once more dis- 
 tressed their Mastei', and He could only still it by repeating the keen re- 
 buke He then gave them. "lu my kingdom," said He, "to be humble is 
 to be great ; the lowliest is, in it, the highest." No more was needed ; the 
 struggle, now, would rather be for the lowest place. 
 
 But He did not confine Himself to words. Rising from the couch, when 
 the supper was just about to begin, and girding Himself with a towel, like 
 a slave, after laying aside His upper garments. He poured water into a 
 basin, and began to wash the feet of the disciples. Pride and selfish ambi- 
 tion could not be more strikingly and touchingly reproved, than by such an 
 act on the part of One who knew that all things had been given into His 
 hands by God His Father, and that He had come forth from Him, and was 
 about to return to Him. No greater proof could be shown of His love, 
 than that such an instance of humility should be its natural expression. 
 Had they all been true-hearted, it would have been amazing in One so trans- 
 cendently above them, but it was still more so, when He knew that one of 
 them Avas already a traitor. He had proclaimed Himself the Son of God, 
 the future judge of the world, the Messiah in whose gift were the honours of 
 heaven, and whose voice was to raise the dead, and they were simple Galilaean 
 fishermen. There could be no commentary on His demand for lowliness, 
 as the true ground of advancement in His kingdom more vivid than His 
 voluntarily performing the lowliest act of personal service to them all. 
 
 He seems to have begun with Simon Peter, His chief Apostle, but the 
 warm heart and the impulsive nature of the rock-like man shrank from 
 allowing his Master to humble Himself thus. " Lord," said he, " dost Thou 
 wash my feet ! " He had not realized the meaning of an act intended as 
 symbolical. " What I do," replied Jesus, " thou understandest not now, but 
 wilt know hereafter." " Thoii, shalt never wash my feet, Lord," reiterated 
 the Apostle. " If I do not wash thee," said Jesus, " thou hast no part with 
 me." " Lord, if that be the case," broke out Peter, " wash not my feet 
 only, but my hands and my head." " It is not necessary," said Jesus. 
 " He who, according to Jewish ways, has taken a bath before his meal, 
 needs no more than to cleanse the dust from his feet, which had clung to 
 them on the way from the bath. Except tliis, he is clean, and it is the 
 same with you, except him who intends to betray me. By my word, which 
 I have spoken to you, and the faith kindled in you by it, you are already 
 clean in the sense I mean — right in the desire of your heart towards me. 
 Yet, though thus clean, the dust of earth still clings to you in part, and 
 makes a last washing needful." The hour was at hand for this last crown- 
 ing act of love— the shedding His blood for them for the remission of their 
 sins— and He would now prepare them for it by this tender symbol, for it 
 taught not only humility, but that He alone could take away sin.
 
 FAREWELL TO FRIENDS. 649 
 
 Having waslied their feet, and resumed His garmeuts, He once more 
 took His place on the conch. 
 
 " Do you know," He asked, as He did so, " the meaning of what I have 
 now done ? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for I am 
 both. Learn, then, that, if I, your Master and Lord, wash your feet, you, 
 also, ought to wash one another's feet, for I have done this as an exainple 
 to you, that you should do to each other as I have done to you. You know, 
 and I would have you remember it, that a servant is not greater than his 
 lord, nor an apostle than He who sent him forth, so that you may well imi- 
 tate me, your superior, in my humility. If you understand what I say, take 
 heed that, henceforth, you act on my teaching. I do not, indeed, speak of 
 you all. I know your characters and hearts, but all has happened in fulfil- 
 ment of the Divine will, for the Scripture must needs be fulfilled, which 
 says, ' He that eats bread with me, craftily lifts up his heel against me,' 
 to trip and overthrow me. I tell you before it hajDpen, that, when it does 
 take place, you may believe that I am indeed the Messiah, and that no 
 other is to be expected. That I should be betrayed by one of ourselves 
 might have shaken your faith in me, but it cannot do so when I have fore- 
 seen and foretold it, as part of the counsel of God. But to cheer and en- 
 courage you in your faithfulness, I announce it, tliat you may go forthwith 
 joyful hearts to the mission on which I have sent you. Your high position, 
 as my Apostles, remains unaffected by the treachery of one of your num- 
 ber. For I now solemnly repeat, what I said before, he who receives you 
 is accounted by me as if he had received myself, and he who receives me 
 receives God the Father who sent me, for He dwells in me, and I in Him." 
 
 The supper now began, but the spirit of Jesus was still clouded and 
 troubled by the presence of the traitor. At last His feelings broke out 
 into irrepressible words. " Yerily, verily," said He, " one of you who eat 
 with me, will betray me. His hand is with me on the table." They had 
 never hitherto realized His hints, and to their honest and faithful hearts 
 the very idea of treason was almost beyond belief. They could not think 
 who was meant, for Judas had managed, by his hypocrisy, to hide his 
 character from them all. One by one, they began to ask, " Lord, is it I ? " 
 "It is one," replied Jesus, " who dips with me into the dish. The Son of 
 man, indeed, goes from this world in this way, by the counsels of God, but 
 woe to that man by whom He is betrayed! It would have been well for 
 him if he had not been born ! " Words thus general only increased the 
 pain and emotion of all. At last, Peter, not venturing to ask directly who 
 it could be, but conscious of his own integrity, beckoned to John, who lay 
 nest our Lord, to ask Him who could be so base. " It is he," whispered 
 Jesus, " who is just about to diiJ the bitter herbs into this charoseth with 
 me, and to whom I shall give some of it presently." 
 
 He then dipped the piece of bread into the charoseth, and handed it to 
 Judas. " Is it IP " asked the guilty man, conscience-stricken, and yet 
 unmelted. He had not heard the words of John, but his guilty soul could 
 not help stammering out the question, in a vain attempt to keep up the 
 mockery of true-heartedness he had acted so long. The awful reply, that 
 " it was," tore away the mask at once, and unveiled his heart. That all
 
 G50 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 was known would have overwhelmed some in shame and contrition, Ijiit it 
 only hardened the betrayer. The wild madness of evil was on him for the 
 time. He could think only of himself ; his fancied wrongs ; his full resolve. 
 Satan had entered his soul, and liis whole nature was bent to the dark 
 ends of tlie Evil One. It may be that the exposure roused him to the 
 heedlessness of despair, as when the arch enemy bade hope farewell, 
 
 " and, with hope, farewell fear. 
 Farewell remorse : all good to me is lost ; 
 Evil, be thou my good ! " 
 
 It was vain for him to seek to hide the workings of his soul by an affected 
 
 outward calm. He had long veiled falsehood 
 
 "under saintly show, 
 Deep malice to conceal, couch' d with revenge." 
 
 But the eyes of his Master shone into the depths of his being, and saw the 
 tumult of his worst passions, in their mastery. " What you have to do," 
 B.iid Jesus, " do quickly." He could not breathe freely till the miserable 
 man had left, and besides, He would fain meet the inevitable as soon as 
 might be, for the slow advance of a catastrophe is harder to bear than the 
 catastrophe itself. Judas knew the meaning of the command at once, and, 
 having received the piece of bread, dipped in the charoseth, moodily took 
 it, and silently withdrew into the outer night. The Eleven were too much 
 confused to realize the end as so near at hand. Beti-ayal might come, but 
 at some future, perhaps distant, time. They only fancied, therefore, that 
 Judas had left either to buy what might be needed during the week of tho 
 feast, or for that special night ; or that Jesus had bethought Himself of 
 some deed of mercy to the poor, and sent him to carry it out. The traitor 
 gone, Christ felt free to speak, and, as if relieved of a load, broke out into 
 a joyful anticipation of His fast-coming triumph. In the near vision of 
 the Cross, His work seemed already finished ; His glory, as Conqueror of 
 Death and Hell, and Redeemer of Mankind, attained, and that of God the 
 Father illustrated. 
 
 " Now," said He, in effect, " the Sou of man is already glorified. All 
 things are hastening to His triumph, and, in that triumph, God Himself 
 will also be glorified, for it is His work which I shall presently complete. 
 And if God be thus glorified in my death for the salvation of man, He will 
 assuredly crown me with His own heavenly glory, when I return to Him ; 
 the glory that I had with Him before I came to earth to become man, and 
 that even now is close at hand, through my death, which will usher me 
 into it. The betrayer has gone to accomplish it ! 
 
 " My children, for I call you so in love, I shall bo only a little while 
 longer with you, and you will feel the want of my presence, and wish for 
 me ; but, as I once said to my enemies, I shall be where you cannot follow 
 and find me. For a parting word, let me give you a last command — my 
 very last ; a new command, to be kept, so much the more — that, hencefoi'th, 
 ye love each other because I have loved you all, and because you all love 
 me. I have often, before, told you to be like God by your loving all men, 
 but I now tell you to do so for the love I bear to you, and for that which 
 you bear to me. You must, henceforth, be known as members of my
 
 FABEWELL TO FRIENDS. 651 
 
 kingdom, by the love you show to each other. And the love you have, as 
 brethren, must be such, and as great, as mine has been towards you all." 
 
 As He thus spoke, Peter still dwelt, in his thoughts, on the sad words 
 which seemed to foreshadow a lasting sepai-ation between him and his 
 Master. "Lord," said he, in his bold, impetuous way, "you speak of 
 going away ; pray tell us whither yoii are going. Will you leave us and 
 go to the Gentiles P " "I go to a place," rei^lied Jesus, " where you cannot 
 follow me at present, however willing you may be to do so. Yet, do not 
 fear. We shall not be sej^arated for ever. You will, one day, follow me, 
 in the same way, and then you will come to me." Peter's heart could not 
 be silent. " I shall be glad to come to Thee, Lord," said he, " even after 
 a time, but why can I not go with Thee now? Thou knowest me. I am 
 ready to lay down my life for Thee." 
 
 " Do you think so ? " replied Jesus, with a look full of friendship, and 
 yet also of earnest sadness. " You little know your own heart. All of you 
 will forsake me, and leave me to my enemies, this very night, as Zechariah, 
 the prophet, has foretold — ' I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the 
 flock will be scattered abroad.' But be not cast down with too much 
 sorrow. After I have risen from the dead, I will go into Galilee, and 
 gather you round me once more." 
 
 The idea of forsaking his Master, whom he loved so dearly, was too in- 
 conceivable, however, to Peter, in the self-confidence of his affection, to 
 allow him to accept it as possible. "Other men may, perhaps, be oft'ended 
 on account of Thee, Lord," said he, " but if all the world were to be so, 
 there is no fear of my failing. I, at any rate, will never leave Thee." 
 
 " Simon, Simon," replied Jesus, using the old name by which he had 
 known him long ago, " take care. Self-confidence will be your undoing. 
 Satan has seen it, and has sought to get God to give you and your fellow- 
 disciples over into his power, as he once did Job, to sift j'ou as wheat is 
 sifted. He would fain have it that your professions are only chaff, and he 
 will shake and test you by temptations, dangers, and troubles, to try to 
 make you turn against me, and thus prove that it is so. But I am mightier 
 than your enemy, and I have prayed for you that, though you fall, you 
 may rise again, and that your faith in me may not give way altogether 
 and separate you entirely from me. Though you will assuredly fall, yet 
 you will repent, and when you have done so, see that you strengthen the 
 faith of your fellow-disciples, and become their helper, to support and con- 
 firm them, if they, like you, waver." 
 
 Peter was sorely distressed at such words. Conscious of his honest love 
 and fidelity, it seemed as if Jesus doubted both. His warm Galila:an heart 
 was full. He felt as if his Master spoke oE his acting in a way of which he 
 could not believe himself capable. " Lord," said he, " I care not what happens 
 to Thee. I am ready to go with Thee to prison, or to die with Thee, but I 
 will never leave Thee, nor be untrue to Thee." " Do you think so, Peter P " 
 replied Jesus, with a voice full of tenderness ; " I tell you that this very night, 
 before the cock crow the second time, you will thrice deny that you know 
 me." " If I were to die for it," answered the Apostle, " no one will ever 
 hear me deny Thee." " I can say the same," added all the other Apostles.
 
 652 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 There was now a jjause for a short time in the conversation. Presently 
 Jesus re-commenced it. " You may wonder at my speaking as I have 
 done to-night," said He, " but there are good grounds for it. Your cir- 
 cumstances will be entirely different, henceforth, from what thoy have 
 been in the past. A time of care and struggle lies before you. When I 
 sent you to travel through the country, preaching the Kingdom, and you 
 had neither purse, nor bag for food, nor sandals, did you miss any of these, 
 or want for anything ? " " Nothing, Lord," said the Eleven. " It will be 
 very different now," replied Jesus. " Whoever has money, let him take it, 
 and let him take provisions for the way, as well ; and let him that has no 
 sword sell his coat to buy one, to defend himself. He who has money and 
 provisions can help himself on by them in his journeys, but he who has 
 none will need to ask hospitality, and, as he will too seldom receive it, let 
 him, at least, have the means of pi'otection. I speak in a figure, for I do 
 not really mean you to fight, or to carry or use a sword, but I wish to 
 impress on you how hostile the world will henceforth be to you, as you go 
 on your journeys as my Apostles ; and what earnest energy and struggle 
 will be needful, on your part, while you are thus carrying the news of the 
 Kingdom through the world. For I tell you, solemnly, that the words of 
 Isaiah, ' And He was reckoned among transgressors,' must be fulfilled in 
 me, for that which has been written of me in Scripture is about to be 
 accomplished." 
 
 The disciples, always ready to understand in the jnost material sense 
 whatever they heard, had failed to catch the real meaning of Jesus in His 
 reference to the sword. They fancied that He wished them to provide 
 weapons to resist approaching danger. " We have two swords," said one 
 of them. " That will do," replied Jesus, gently avoiding further explana- 
 tion. " You will not need more than the two," — a touch of sad irony 
 which sufficed to show, even then, that He had thought of something very 
 different as their defence than the purchase of arms; for how were the 
 nine, who had no swords at all, to protect themselves, when scattered on 
 the apostolic journeys of which He had spoken ? 
 
 The evening was now somewhat advanced, according to Eastern notions, 
 but the Passover meal, in its different rites, could not be hurried. Though 
 we caiinot tell how far the usual customs were followed by Jesus, the feast 
 began thus in other circles. A cup of red wine, mingled with a fourth 
 part of water, to make it a pleasant and temperate drink, was filled by one 
 of the company, and given to the head of the family, who took it in his 
 right hand as he rested on the couch, on his left side and arm, and thanked 
 God in the words — " Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, Thou King of the 
 world, who createdst the fruit of the vine." He then tasted the cup, and 
 passed it round. Thanks for the institution of the washing of hands 
 followed, and then the washing itself, which was merely formal. "Bitter" 
 herbs, such as endives, lettuce, and the like, were next set on the table, to 
 represent the hard life of Egypt. Thanks were given for them also, and 
 then they were passed round and eaten, after dipping them in a mixture 
 of salt and vinegar. The unleavened bread— the bread of affliction— 
 which gave one of its names to the feast, followed next, and then the bowl
 
 FAREWELL TO FRIENDS. 653 
 
 of charoseth and the Passover lamb. After this, the head of the company 
 once more gave thanks to Him " who created the fruit of the earth," and 
 the bitter herbs wei'e dipped by each in the charoseth, and a piece of it, 
 " the size of an olive," eaten with them by all. A second single cup of 
 wine mingled with water, was now poured out, discourse on the lessons of 
 the feast was held, and then the hundred and thirteenth and hundred and 
 fourteenth Psalms, part of the Hallel, were sung. Another short thanks- 
 giving followed, and the cup was once more passed round and tasted. 
 
 The household father now washed his hands again, and then took two of 
 the unleavened cakes, and breaking one of them across, laid the pieces on 
 the other, and pronounced a thanksgiving — " Blessed be He who makes 
 bread to grow from the earth," wrapped some bitter herbs round a piece of 
 the broken bread, dipped it in the charoseth, ate it, after another special 
 thanksgiving, and, with it, a part of the lamb ; the others following his 
 example. The supper had only now properly begun. Each ate and drank 
 at his will ; all, alike, in the patriarchal way of the East, lifting what they 
 chose from the common dish, with their fingers. A third cup of wine, 
 passed round, marked the close of the feast as a religious solemnity. 
 
 The meal had advanced thus far, and was now virtually finished, when 
 the warning had been given of the approaching denial of their Master by 
 Peter, and the weak-minded desertion of the Eleven. The solemn words, 
 foretelling the [dangers and trials before them, had been added, when 
 Jesus, now in the bosom of the little band, nearest and dearest to Him on 
 earth — His companions through the past years, since His public work be- 
 gun—introduced by an act befitting, in its simplicity, a sjoiritual religion 
 like His, the institution which, henceforth, should supersede in His king- 
 dom on earth the feast they had ended. Homage had been paid for the 
 last time, as in farewell, to the Past ; they were, hereafter, to honour the 
 new Symbol of the Future, 
 
 He was about to leave them, and, as yet, they had no rite, however 
 simple, to form a centre round which they might permanently gather. 
 Some emblem was needed, by which they might, hereafter, be distin- 
 guished ; some common bond, which should outwardly link them to each 
 other, and to their common Master. The Passover had been the symbol 
 of the theocracy of the past, and had given the people of God an outward, 
 ever-recurring remembrance of their relations to each other and to their 
 invisible King. As the founder of the New Israel, Jesus would now insti- 
 tute a special rite for its members, in all ages and countries. The Old 
 Covenant of God with the Jew had found its vivid embodiment in the 
 yearly festivity He had that night, for the last time, observed. The New 
 Covenant must, henceforth, have an outward embodiment also; more 
 spiritual, as became it, but equally vivid. 
 
 Nothing could have been more touching and beautiful in its simplicity 
 than the symbol now introduced. The Third Cup was known as " the cup 
 of blessing," and had marked the close of the meal, held to do honour to 
 the economy that was passing away. The bread had been handed round 
 with the words, "This is the bread of affliction;" and the flesh of the lamb 
 iiad been distributed with the words, " This is the body of the Passover."
 
 654 THE LIFE OF CnillST. 
 
 The foast of the ancient people of God having been honoured by these 
 striking utterances, — Jesus took one of the loaves or cakes before Him, 
 gave thanks, broke it, and handed it to the Aj)ostlcs with words, the re- 
 petition, almost exactly, of those they had heard a moment before — "Take, 
 eat ; this is my body, which is given for you ; tiiis do in remembrance of 
 me." Then, taking the cup, which had been filled for the fourth and last 
 handing round. He gave thanks to God once more, and passed it to the 
 circle, with the words, " Drink ye all of it, for this cup is the New Cove- 
 nant " jaresently to be made " in my blood ; " instead of the covenant made 
 also in blood, by God, with your fathers ; " it is," in abiding symbol, " my 
 blood of the Covenant" of my Father, with the New Israel, "which is shed 
 for you and for many for the remission of sins. This do, as often as ye 
 drink, in remembrance of Me." 
 
 For Himself, He declined to taste it. " I will not drink, henceforth," 
 said He, " of the fruit of the vine — for it was still only wine — till that day, 
 when, at the end of all things, the Kingdom of God, wdiich I have founded, 
 shall finally triumph, and my followers be gathered to the great heavenly 
 feast. Then, I shall drink it new with you and them." 
 
 Such, and so simple, was the new rite of the Spiritual Theocracy. To 
 those around Him at its institution, there could be no doubt of its mean- 
 ing and nature, for it was, even in words, a counterpart of that which He 
 had superseded with a purer and more si^iritual form. The cup, He told 
 them, was a symbol of the New Covenant, under which, as His followers, 
 they had come ; in distinction from that v/hich they had left, for His sake. 
 It was to be a memorial of Him, and a constant recognition of their faith 
 in the virtue of His atoning death — that death, whose shed blood was the 
 seal of this New Covenant between the subjects of His kingdom, and God, 
 His Father. It symbolized before all ages, to the New Israel, the cardinal 
 virtue of His death. The Apostles could have had no simpler or more un- 
 mistakable intimation that as the blood of the Passover lamb redeemed the 
 people of God, of old, from the sword of the angel of wrath. His blood 
 would be a ransom for man from far deadlier peril. A covenant, to them, 
 implied a sacrifice, and His blood, as the New Covenant, was therefore 
 sacrificial ; the blood of a Covenant which pledged His followers to faith 
 and duty ; the blood of a new paschal lamb, with which His disciples 
 must, in figure, be sprinkled, that the destroying angel might pass over 
 them, in the day of judgment. The custom of the nation to use a common 
 meal as the special occasion of religious fellowship, made the new institu- 
 tion easy and natural to the Apostles, and the constant employment of 
 symbols in their hereditary religion prevented their misconceiving the 
 meaning of the one now introduced for the first time. They saw in it an 
 abiding memorial of their Lord ; a vivid enforcement of their dependence 
 on the merits of His death, as a sacrifice for their salvation ; the need of 
 intimate spiritual communion with Him as the bread of life, and the bond 
 of the new brotherhood He had established. The joint commemoration of 
 His broken body and shed blood was, henceforth, to distinguish the asseiu- 
 blies of His followers from the world at large. Excepting baptism, it was 
 the one outward form in the Society established by their Master.
 
 FAEEWELL TO FRIENDS. 655 
 
 From a rite thus simple, doctrines have been developed by theological 
 zeal and heated fancy, which would have alike startled and shocked those 
 who first partook of it. It has been forgotten how Jesus, Himself, in 
 answer to the cavil, " How can He give us His flesh to cat ? " repudiated 
 the literalism which caught at sound, and missed the sense. " My flesh — 
 my bodily persoji," said He, "profiteth nothing towards procuring eternal 
 life ; to talk of eating it to gain that life is unworthy trifling ; it is the 
 Spirit who quickens the soul to a new, immortal, and heavenly existence, 
 and that Spirit acts through the words of sacred truth which I speak to 
 you. Thei/ are spirit, and they are life." 
 
 CHAPTER LIX. 
 
 THE FAREWELL. 
 
 TERUSALEM was the brightest and happiest of cities on this Passover 
 ^ night. But though the hum of universal rejoicing rose on every side, 
 there was only sadness in the little band round Jesus. One of their num- 
 ber had proved a traitor, and their Leader had told them, once more, that 
 He would very soon leave them. They were sore at heart from shame at 
 the baseness of Iscariot, at the dread of losing a Master they passionately 
 loved, and at the utter miscarriage of all their half-worldly, half -religious 
 expectations of earthly glory. Christ had instituted a rite to mark them 
 as apart from all other men, but it looked as if there would be little use 
 for it, in the apparently near overthrow of His infant Kingdom. 
 
 As they reclined, sad and silent, Jesus read their thoughts, and began to 
 cheer them, by turning their minds from the gloomy present to the glorious 
 future. 
 
 " Let not your hearts be troubled with care and anxiety in such a way," 
 said He ; "believe in God, and in me. His Son, who speak in His name, 
 and let that faith lead you to trust confidently that the promises made you 
 will be fulfilled. I have, indeed, told you that I must go to my Father, 
 but I have told you, also, that I will return. You have, assuredly, nothing 
 to expect on earth exceijt trial, but your reward in the world to come may 
 well raise you above all sorrow on that account. In heaven, my Father's 
 house, are many mansions ; you need not fear that everlasting habitations 
 in glory will fail you. If it were not so, I would have told you, for I never 
 deceive you. Nay, more, I am your forerunner thither. If I go away, it 
 is to prepare a place for you. I am your friend, going home before you, 
 to get all ready for your glad reception when you follow me. 
 
 " Nor is this all ; I will return to fetch you to my heavenly home, that 
 where I am, you may be also, for ever. If you remember what I have 
 said in the past, you will know not only whither I am going, but, since it 
 is I who prepare a place for you above, and I, and no other, who will come 
 to lead you thither, you must also know the way." 
 
 He alluded to His spiritual return, at the blissful death of His servants, 
 to guide them to Hhnself, above, and He had told them, not long before, 
 that He was the door of the great fold, and that if any man entered by
 
 6oQ THE LIFE OF CimiST. 
 
 Him, he would be saved. But this, like so much else, had been misunder- 
 stood and forgotten. 
 
 A full and satisfying answer to the question of Peter, lay in these words. 
 But it was not enough to calm the fears and doubts in the minds of the 
 Apostles. They still clung fondly to their oartlily hopes of the Messiah's 
 Kingdom, and though they, perhaps, realized the near departure of their 
 Master, they had not, even yet, come to comprehend that it meant His 
 death. Hence His figurative language remained so dai-k to them, that 
 Thomas, constitutionally given as he was, to seek clearness and certainty, 
 interrupted Him with a reverent freedom, — 
 
 " Lord, we do not, as yet, know whither Thou art going, and hoAV can we 
 know the way in Avhicli to follow Thee.'^ " The questioner wished to find 
 out the way by learning the goal ; but Christ, in His answer, pointed him 
 to the way as revealing all else. 
 
 " I myself, and no other, am the Way," said He, " because no one comes 
 to the Father, in His heavenly glory, but through me. I am the true Way, 
 for I speak only the truth given me from above, to make known ; the way 
 to life, for he who believes in me shall live by me, and shall have ever- 
 lasting life, and I shall raise him up at the last day. If ye have known 
 me — the Way — ye will know whither I am going— to my Father — for, 
 since he who sees the Son sees the Father also, you know Him from this 
 time, and have seen Him, in seeing me. I am the Way, because no one 
 can reach my Fathei''s presence but through faith in me as the Saviour ; 
 the Truth, because I am the self-revelation of God ; the Light, come into 
 the world, without following which no one can gain salvation ; the Life, 
 because I am the source and spring of eternal life, so that he who does not 
 receive me into his heart, by faith, is already condemned." 
 
 Philip had listened, but could not understand. He could only think 
 that Jesus, in speaking of seeing the Father, alluded to some mysterious 
 appearance of Jehovah, for the purpose of founding the earthly kingdom 
 of the Messiah. With a childlike simplicity, therefore, he asked, turning 
 to Christ — "Lord, show us the Father, and all our wishes will be satisfied." 
 
 No one who had thought over the words, " If ye have known me, ye have 
 known my Father also," and had understood them, could have asked such 
 a question. It marked an amazing want of intelligent appreciation of the 
 teaching of our Lord, and of His mode of speech. Hence, the answer of 
 Christ sounds almost sad. *' Have I been so long with you, and do you 
 know so little of me, Philip ? If you really knew me, j'ou would not ask 
 me to show you the Father. He cannot be shown to the natural sight. 
 But he who sees me, and rightly understands whom I am, knows the 
 Father, in thus knowing me. Such an one realizes that in me the highest 
 possible revelation of God has appeared, and has no wish to have any 
 higher, or other outward and material manifestation of Him. You speak 
 as if you did not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me, 
 and that hence, as I said, he who sees me sees the Father also. The proof 
 that it is so, is in my words, for they are not my own, but His. If you 
 doubt this, you do not need to believe merely because I say so ; believe it 
 on the proof of the works that I do, for it is not I who do them, but the
 
 THE FAREWELL. 657 
 
 » 
 
 Fatlicr. Put away yoni- gross earthly ideas. What I mean is, that the 
 Fatlier is revealed by the Son, as His image and likeness, but only in a 
 spiritual sense, to the eye of faith and of the soul." 
 
 Jesus now turned to the Apostles at large, and resumed His discourse 
 at the point He had reached, when, first, Thomas, and then Philip, had 
 broken in with their questions. 
 
 " I have promised you eternal life," said He, " if you trust me and my 
 Father, Let me do more, that you may be cheered and supported in your 
 future labours for my Kingdom. I tell you, with all solemnitj-, that if you 
 have this true faith in me, and love towards me, you will have the power 
 to do just such wonderful works as I have done, and even greater, for I am 
 going to my Father, to be raised to all poAver in heaven and earth ; so that 
 .you may feel sure that your prayers, as my Apostles, offered in my name 
 for the advancement of my Kingdom, will be heard and answered, in all 
 their fulness. You will receive power from above to overcome the world 
 by your labours as my Apostles ; to spread the Gospel among all nations, 
 and to triumph over all Jewish and Gentile opposition. I mean this when 
 I speak of your doing greater works than my outward miracles on one 
 here and one there. It is I who will give you this power, for I am in my 
 Father, and my Father is in me, and He works through me, and I shall 
 give it that my Father may be glorified by my triumph ; for His glory is 
 the great end of my work, now and hereafter. So mighty, indeed, will 
 be your prayers in my name, as my Apostles, that I will do not only what 
 you ask, for the spread of my Kingdom, but I will do it whenever, and as 
 often as ever, you ask it. 
 
 " But if you desire that so great an honour should be granted you, that 
 I should hear and answer all your prayers, you must, above all things, 
 keep my commandments, for by doing so you best show your love for me. 
 
 " I know you feel sad at the thought of losing my presence and help, 
 and wonder who will stand by you and aid you when I am gone. Be not 
 afraid. I will not leave jon alone, but will see that my place be supplied, 
 so that you want for nothing. For I will ask the Father, and He will give 
 you another Helper and Counsellor, who will not leave you, as I must now 
 do, but will abide with you for ever — protecting, helping, strengthening 
 you, in all your needs ; the Spirit of Truth, who imparts the Divine Truth 
 to the hearts of men, leads them to know it, and quickens them to all 
 spiritual power. The unbelieving world cannot receive Him, because they 
 have not the inward sight — the spiritual sympathy — to know Him, and 
 He is not visible to the outward sense. But they cannot comprehend, and 
 will not receive, anything that is not material and apparent to the bodily 
 eye. You, however, who believe in me, will know Him, for He will remain 
 with you, aiid will be ia you, and your own experience will make you feel 
 that He is so. 
 
 " Nor is this all, my dear ones. I will not leave you like orphans ; as if 
 I, your spiritual Father, had gone from you for ever. Not only will you 
 have the Spirit of Truth with you, but I, myself, will shortly return to 
 you. In a very little while longer the world will see me no more, but you 
 will see me, though not bodily present. You -will see me in spirit, and 
 
 TT u
 
 658 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 I'oel that I commune with you and work in j^ou, tlirougli the Spirit, whom 
 I will send. I shall be alive, thoupjh unseen, for I will rise from the dead 
 and live for evermore, and Avill make you partakers of my heavenly and 
 deathless life. By this higher spiritual life ye shall know, in that day, 
 when, by the gift of my Spirit, I come to you in power, that I am in my 
 Father, and you in me, and I in you. When I come, finally, in outward 
 glory, at the last day, as I have told you already, you will have no mort, 
 doubts or fears, as you now have in this time of my lowliness and humilia- 
 tion. You will then know, when you see me descend in heavenly majesty 
 — as you shall have already felt when I come, very soon, by the Spirit — 
 that my words are true ; that I am indeed in my Father, and you in me, 
 and I in you ; that we are for ever inseparably one with the Father, and 
 with each other. 
 
 " But only he who has my commandments in his heart, and practises 
 them in his life, truly loves me, and will be loved by my Father and by 
 me. To him will I reveal my presence in his soul, by the Spii'it through 
 whom I commune with him." 
 
 Here Judas Thaddeus, " the brave," the sou of an unknown James, inter- 
 rupted the discourse by a reverent question. With the simple literal ideas 
 of his age and nation, he could not understand what Jesus had said about 
 manifesting Himself only to individual believers, and not to all men. He 
 still expected a visible appearance of Christ, in glory, as the Messiah, to 
 judge the unbelieving world, and set up His own Kingdom. "What has 
 hajopened. Lord ? " asked he, " to make Thee determine to show Thyself as 
 the Messiah only to us, and not to the world at large ? How comes it ? " 
 
 " The reason," replied Jesus, " is, that the world, so long as it does not 
 believe in me and love me, is neither morally capable of receiving such a 
 manifestation of me, as I mean — a spiritual communion with the soul — 
 nor worthy of it. Only believing aud faithful hearts can become, or desire 
 to become, the abode of my Father or of myself, so that We may live in 
 that loving fellowship with them which reveals Us to them. I do not 
 speak of such an outward and visible dwelling with men as when the 
 Divine gloiy rested between the cherubim, or over the Tabernacle ; but an 
 unseen abode, by the Holy Spirit, in the soul as in a Temple. Only he 
 who loves me, and, loving me, keeps my commandments, can have this 
 honour and blessedness. Such an one my Father as well as I will love, 
 and wo will come to him and make our abode with him. He who does not 
 love me will not keep my commandments. I call my commandments mine, 
 but, in reality, they ai'e those of my Father who sent me. With such an one, 
 tlierefoi'e, as rejects God's words and does not obey them, the Father and I 
 cannot make our abode, and thus I cannot manifest myself in this spiritual 
 way, of which alone I speak at this moment, except to individual souls." 
 
 There was now a short pause ; but, after a time, Jesiis began again. 
 Glancing back at all He had said to them during the evening, and knowing 
 that much of it must be dark and enigmatical to their simple minds, He 
 lovingly cheered them by some further kind words. 
 
 " I have said these things to you while I am still with you, but I know 
 that you hardly understand some of my sayings, and that you will neccs -
 
 THE FAREWELL. 659 
 
 sarily forget others. The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will scud iu my 
 name, at my request, to be your heavenly Friend and Helper, Avill, how- 
 ever, throw light on every point, and bring to your vivid remembrance all 
 that I have noAV told you ; giving you a fuller and wider understanding 
 of the truths I have only briefly opened. 
 
 " Fear not, my beloved ones, all will be well with you," added He, for 
 they were sorely troubled. "You know how you wish your friends, 
 ' Peace ' when you part from them. My farewell greeting is ' Peace be 
 with you'— the peace of reconciliation to God, and o£ eternal salvation in 
 my Kingdom, which I have gained for you as your Saviour. My peace, 
 coming from me and hj me, I leave you ; for it v/ill be won for you, as an 
 vmdying gift, by my death, now so near. This gift, my peace, is of a 
 wholly different kind from that which men wish each other in their fai^e- 
 wells — mere earthly joy and pi-osperity, which leave the soul unblessed. 
 My peace carries with it lasting good and true unfading happiness, for it 
 is that of the soul. 
 
 " As I began, therefore, I shall end : Let not your heart be troubled, 
 neither let it be afraid, now or hereafter. Why should it be either ? In- 
 stead of sadness you ought to feel joy, for I have told you that, though I 
 go away now, I shall come to you again. Indeed, if you love me, as I know 
 you do, you will be glad to hear me say that I am going back to my Father; 
 for here my Father has used my human weakness to speak His words and 
 do His works, for the salvation of man. The mortal nature I now wear 
 has been His feeble and indirect instrument. But when I return to Him. 
 my Kingdom will be under His direct power. My work, thenceforth, will 
 rest alone and directly in His hand, and He will complete by His mighty 
 power, through His Spirit, what I have begun on earth; without human 
 limitation, such as has been inevitable while He wrought through me as 
 the Son of man, a man like yourselves. He, working with His Almighty 
 power, directly, through His Spirit, is greater, as a help to my Kingdom, 
 than I can be while I act for Him through this dying bod3^ 
 
 " I have told you now, while I am still with you, that I shall presently 
 leave you, to prevent your faith from being shaken when I am gone. The 
 hour of my departure approaches ; I shall not speak much with j^ou after 
 this. For the Prince of this World — the evil one — is already coming 
 against me. But fear not, he has no power over me. There is nothing in 
 my soul which he can assail ; no sin by whicli ho can claim me as his. Nor 
 do I need to yield to him iu anything, for I could, if I chose, avoid the death 
 with which he threatens me. But, that the world may know my love to 
 the Father, and that I do what He has appointed for me as His will, though 
 it Ijc to die, let us rise from the tabic, and go forth to meet the powers 
 of darkness, befoi'e whom, according to the counsels of God, I shall fall." 
 
 The whole company hereupon rose and prepared to leave the room. But 
 Jesus, full of thoughts which He longed, even yet, to utter, before His 
 ever nearer se])aration, stood, as it were, fixed to the spot by His love to 
 them, and ouce more began to speak. He could not bring Himself to 
 break up this last communion He should have with them. 
 
 He began by the well-known and l)eautiful comparison of Himself and
 
 G60 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 the Apostles to a vine and its branches. Perhaps the thought rose from 
 the sight of the wine-cup on the tahle and its recent use at the evening's 
 feast, or perhaps the house stood amidst vines, and branches may h<ave 
 been trained round the window, or the vineyard itself may have lain below 
 in the bright moonlight. 
 
 " This vine with its branches and fruit," said Ho, pointing to the wine- 
 cup, or to the vines outside, "is a type, in its earthly and visible way, of 
 a heavenly and Divine truth. I am the true vine, ye are the branches, and 
 my Father is the husbandman. He sent me into the world ; He has given 
 me such faithful souls as you, and joined 3'ou Avith nie, in living fellow- 
 ship and communion ; He has tended the growth of tlie truth in the past, 
 for it is He who has been working through me, and He will continue to do 
 so by His Holy Spirit after I leave you. 
 
 "As in the natural vine there are fruitful and unfruitful branches, so, 
 in my fellowship, there are some who bear fruit both in word and in act, 
 and some who do not. Only those who are pure and sincere — those who 
 truly love me and keep my commands — have the abiding communion with 
 me from which such fruit-fulness springs ; for, as the careful husbandman 
 cuts off the unfruitful branch, and cleans away with his ^Jrnning-knifc all 
 that would hinder the full fruitfulness of the good one, so does my Father 
 with my disciples. 
 
 " But be ye comforted. You have been pruned and made clean by your 
 loving and obedient recej^tion of the truths I have told you, and by the 
 discipline through which you have passed. Dismiss anxious care ! You 
 will not be cut off as unfruitful branches. My Father will make you still 
 more fruitful ; will cleanse away all that hinders your progress in grace, 
 and will perfect you in the end. Bnt, to secure this growing fruitfulness, 
 3'OU must cherish fondly your communion with me ; grafted into me, as the 
 branches into the stem of the vine. If j'ou do so, I will not separate myself 
 from you, any more than the vine tears itself from its branches, but will 
 strengthen you by my spiritual aid. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself 
 if it do not abide in the vine, you cannot bring forth good fruit except ye abide 
 in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches ; the living power to bear fruit 
 comes only from me. But if you abide in me, you will bear much fruit. 
 All true work as my disciples— all' spiritual life — comes only from fellow- 
 ship with me, fellowship, each in the other, close as that of the vine and its 
 branches ; for apart from me ye can do nothing. As unfruitful branches 
 are cut off by the husbandman, and cast out of the vineyard and left to 
 dry up, and then gathered and cast into the fire and burned, so, those who 
 break away from living union with me will be cut off from me here, by my 
 Father; and hence the religious life will wither up in them while they live, 
 and at the last day they will suffer the judgment of God. But if ye abide 
 in loving, spiritual union with me, and hold fast my commandments and 
 keep them, you may ask what you will, and it will be done to you, for yon 
 will then ask in my name only such things as are in keeping with my will. 
 And it is a great motive for your abiding in me, that your doing so glori- 
 fies my Father by leading to your bearing much fruit, through my answers 
 to your prayers. You will farther, by this fulfilment of your prayers.
 
 THE FAREWELL. 661 
 
 become truly, and in the strict sense, my disciples, for such spiritual fruit- 
 fulness is the special mark of my true disciples only. 
 
 " That you may thus continue in living fellowship and spiritual union 
 with me, let me remind you that the uniting bond of this fellowship be- 
 tween me, my Father, and you, is love ; and that, on your side, all depends 
 on your showing yourselves true and obedient, in this love to me and in the 
 practice of my commands, as I have shown and still show myself towards 
 my Father and His commands. As He has loved me, I have loved you ; 
 see that ye continue henceforth to love and obey me, that I may still for 
 ever be able to love you. I have spoken thus, that the same joy which I 
 have in knowing that I abide in my Father's love, may be felt by you, from 
 your knowing that you abide in my love, and that this holy joy of soul may 
 increase, more and more, to a heavenly fulness." 
 
 The sound of the word "love," so dear to the heart of Christ, led Him 
 back to the new commandment He had given a few minutes before. That 
 His disciples should love one another was the true secret of keeping His 
 commandments, and so of retaining their place in His heart, and securing 
 the holy joy of soul He desired for them. He now defined His requirements 
 more narrowly. They were to love each other as He had loved them, and 
 that meant. He told them, self-sacrifice, even to death, for their sakes. 
 
 " You wish, I am sure," said He, " to retain my love after I leave you, 
 and will strive to keep my commandments that you may do so. These 
 commandments are summed up in the one which I gave you to-night, 
 already, that ye love one another. I only add, that that love must be such 
 as I have shown and will presently show to you ; love so great, that, in 
 furtherance of the Divine purpose for your salvation, I willingly lay down 
 my life for yoii. There can be none greater between man and man, and 
 this highest example — this joyful sacrifice of life itself for each other- 
 must be your standard. Nothing less is the ideal I require in my Xew 
 Society. Only the spirit which would not shrink from this, makes true and 
 full obedience to my command possible, with all the blessings it brings. 
 
 " If you thus rise to a love like mine, you will bind me to you in closest 
 undying affection ; affection not as from master to servant, or teacher to 
 disciple, but as of friend to friend. If, by having this love, you do the 
 things I command you, I shall call you my friends, my loved and trusted 
 ones ; for doing is the only proof I accept of loving. I know, indeed, that 
 you will, and therefore, henceforth, I call you no longer mere servants, as 
 in the past, but trusted friends. For the servant obej's vvithout knowing 
 his lord's thoughts and plans, but you have been told all I have heard from 
 my Father, so far as you are able to hear and understand it ; told it, not as 
 mere servants and messengers; the blind instruments of my will, but in the 
 fulness of loving confidence, as sharers of my inmost thoughts and heart. 
 
 '■ But great though the honour be I thus give you, never forget that 5-ou 
 have not, like the disciples of the Rabbis, with him whom they follow, 
 chosen me for your teacher, master, and friend. On the contrary, I chose 
 you, not for mere idle friendship, but that I might appoint you to go foi'th 
 as my disciples, and work in spreading my Kingdom, and bear fruit in 
 V, inning men to the truth ; fruit that would remain for ever, both for your- 
 
 \
 
 G62 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 selves and for tliosc you led to the light. Tims you owe fill to me ; your 
 first disciplcsliip, no less than the friendship to which I have now advanced 
 you ; and also that amazing honour I have promised you, that so long as 
 you keep my commands, the Father will give you whatever you ask in my 
 name. How much fruit may ye not bear with this heavenly help, and how 
 great the reward before God when ye have borne it ! 
 
 " Once more, never forget that v.dthout true brotherly love all your 
 labour'is valueless, for the spirit that prompts your acts or words alone 
 gives them worth. 
 
 " Wonder not that I enforce this call to mutual love. Let it reign with- 
 in my New Society, for, outside, you will have only hatred. But let me 
 comfort you by the thought that, as you know, it has hated me first. To 
 be hated by it, is only to share my lot. And let it still more console you, 
 to remember that this very hatred by the unbelieving world, is a proof that 
 you no longer belong to it. If you belonged to it, it would love its own, 
 for like loves like. It hates you, because I have chosen you out of it, and 
 made j-ou mine. To be hated of the ungodly is a testimony to your worth, 
 as to be loved by them would be to your discredit. How ought this to 
 cheer you in all your future trials ! 
 
 " Eemember what I said to you to-night, already, ' A servant is not 
 greater than his lord.' If they have persecuted me, as you know they havei 
 they will also persecute you ; if they have received my teaching, as you 
 know they have not, they will receive yours as little. They will hate you 
 and persecute you, because you come in my name, confessing me as the 
 Messiah and Saviour — for they know not Him who sent me. 
 
 " This hatred of my name has no excuse, for I have dwelt among men, 
 and taught them the truth, and have done works among them which no 
 other prophet or messenger of God has done; works which should have 
 made them feel that God had sent me, for they were such as Israel itself 
 had agreed to accept as proof of the presence of the Messiah, and they 
 showed that my teaching was His Divine word to them. But though they 
 have both heard my teaching, and seen my mighty works, they have not 
 believed. They have, thus, I repeat, no excuse. Nor is their hatred of my 
 name, hatred of me alone ; it is hatred of God, my Father, no less ; for my 
 word and works, which they hate and reject, are not mine, but His. And 
 as these words and works are thus the self -revelation of my Father — as He 
 thus, by them, had made Himself visible in me, so far as the invisible God 
 can do so— their hatred of me involves the awful wickedness of a hatred 
 of the Eternal Father. Yet this hatred of me by the unbelieving world is 
 not a mere accident or chance, but was foreseen by God and spoken of in 
 ancient prophecy, as you read : ' They hated me without a cause.' 
 
 " You may, however, say in your hearts, ' If they have persecuted Thee, 
 and have not kept Thy word; if, after having been taught, and having seen 
 such things, they would not receive them ; if they have hated Thee, and 
 Thy Father, and if we are to find the same treatment, what good is there 
 in sending us to them ? ' Let me encourage you, and dissipate such 
 thoughts. For when the Helper comes, whom I shall send unto you from 
 the Father— the Spirit of Truth, who goes forth from the Father, and
 
 THE FAREWELL. 663 
 
 therefore is able to help yoii in all your needs — He will bear witiiebs of me 
 in your souls ; teaching you more deeply concerning mc, and glorifying 
 me to you in doing so, that you may be able to make right and effective 
 use, in your witness before men, of all you have seen and heard while with 
 me, from the beginning of my public work as the Messiah. 
 
 " I have told you these things about the hatred the world will show you 
 for my sake, that you may bo prepared for it, and not stumble, or be of- 
 fended on account of it ; but may meet it with so much the more earnest 
 zeal and fidelity. As I have often said, they will put you out of the sjma- 
 gogucs ; but this, hard though it be in its consequences, is not the worst 
 their fanatical hatred will do. Yon know how the Rabbis teach, that 'he 
 who sheds the blood of the wicked is as if he offered sacrifice.' They will 
 act on this jDriirciple towards you ; for the hour comes when every one who 
 kills you will think your l:)lood is an acceptable sacrifice offered to God. 
 Nor will the heathen treat you better. Israel knows neither the Father 
 nor me ; and this wilful ignorance of Divine things makes them act thus. 
 I tell you all this, that, when these times of persecution come, you may be 
 strengthened in your faith in me, and in your patient endurance of suffer- 
 ing for my sake. I did not speak of these things till now, because they 
 were still distant when you first followed me, and because they might then 
 have frightened you awa.y from me. Besides, as long as I live, the hatred 
 of men Avill be directed against me, not against you." 
 
 It is hard for even the best to rise superior to what is present or near, 
 by thinking of the distant or future. The Eleven were thoroughly cast 
 down and dispirited, and stood silent, unable to break the stillness, even by 
 a few of those questions which the disciples of Jewish teachers were in the 
 habit of putting to their masters. The loitj promises of Jesus would one 
 day strengthen their faithful souls ; but, for the time, they had no ear for 
 them. As He spoke, He saw this, and gently reproved it. 
 
 " Now that I am on the point of returning to my Father," said He, " why 
 are you so wholly engrossed in sadness, that while friends are always wont 
 to ask often from one about to leave them, ' Avhere he is going,' j-ou have 
 not been eager to do so in my case ? " He wished them to inquire more 
 closely about His going away, for it seemed as if His disciples had not 
 fully understood His previous words, else they could not be so dejected. 
 
 " You forget the consolation I have given you, and dwell only on my 
 near leaving, and the troubles to come after it. But I tell you the truth, 
 when I say that it is better for you that I go away. For if I were not to 
 do so, your great Helper would not come to you ; but, if I go away, I will 
 send Him to you." 
 
 The history of the Church, after the ascension of Jesus and the effusion 
 of the Holy Spirit, explains and confirms these words. Only the once 
 Crucified but now Eisen One, the glorified Son of God, sitting at the right 
 hand of the Father, could have been proclaimed by the Apostles as the Lord 
 of a new, eternal, and si)iritual kingdom of heaven. Only the Conqueror 
 of Death, the Son of God, who had returned triumphant to the glory of the 
 Father, could have been announced to the world as the Righteous One, the 
 Victor over the Prince of this World, as He not to believe in wiiom was sin,
 
 664 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Jesus continued : " You will have to strive, even to blood, with the oppo- 
 sition of the unbelieving world, and their evil opinion of me ; against their 
 illusion that they are doing right in their unbelief and in their persecution 
 of my servants ; and against their trust in the invincible power of wicked 
 men, and of the prince of darkness. All these you must resist and over- 
 come. But human eloquence is far too weak for this great task. Without 
 assistance and help from above, you will never be aljle to convince men 
 of their sin and error, or to drive out the reign of evil. But when your 
 Heavenly Helper has come. He will, through you, show the world their sin 
 in not believing in me, and in persecuting you, my servants. He will also 
 convince them of my righteousness— that is, that I am not unrighteous 
 and sinful, as they suppose, but that my righteousness and innocence have 
 been shown by my not shrinking even from the death of the Cross in the 
 fulfilment of my great work ; by my rising from the grave, and thereby 
 proving that my death was a voluntary act of love to man, and by my re- 
 turning to my Father, Avhich will show that I am His Son, sent by Him as 
 the Messiah. Thus it will be seen that my cause is righteous, and that I 
 am the righteous and holy One of God. He will, finally, convince men of 
 the utter weakness of all the jjowers of evil, and of their having been 
 judged and condemned of God, by revealing to them the complete overthrow 
 of the reign of the devil and of the works of darkness, by my life, my 
 teaching, my death, my resurrection, my return to my Father, and my vic- 
 torious help to you my servants." 
 
 He had touched the confines of great and mysterious truths in the future 
 economy of His kingdom, but felt Himself hindered from going further. 
 A wide field of higher teaching lay before Him, but their present weakness 
 and incapacity to understand lofty spiritual things, forced Him to break 
 off further revelations. " I have yet many things," He continued, "to say 
 to you, but you cannot hear them now. Tet be not cast down. When 
 your Helper, the Spirit of Truth, comes from above. He will give j^ou fuller 
 instructions, and will strengthen your minds to understand them. He will 
 lead you to the knowledge of the truth in its whole extent, and will illu- 
 minate for you all the heights and depths of my meaning in all that I have 
 said to you. ISTor need you fear to trust Him as fully as you have trusted 
 me; for just as I have not spoken of myself, but have only repeated what 
 I have heard from my father, He, the Spirit of Truth, will not speak for 
 HiiBself or of His own promptings, but will utter only what He has heard 
 from God. ISTor will He simply explain my words, and reveal higher aspects 
 of the truth. He will also announce to you things future. He will give you, 
 my Apostles, the gift of prophecy, by which the future development of my 
 Kingdom will be revealed to you, to fill you with comfort and triumph. 
 
 " You must not think, however, that the Holy Spirit will teach you any 
 new or different truths, not connected with me, your Saviour. He will only 
 purify and enlighten your hitherto imperfect conceptions concerning me, 
 and, while thus fitting you to spread my kingdom, will but develop, expand, 
 and complete what I have taught you, and thus increase my glory. All 
 that the Father has is mine, as the Son consecrated and sent forth by Him 
 to carry out His work -the Son, in whom the Father, for this end, dwells
 
 THE FAREWELL. 665 
 
 and works in closest commnnioii ; He also dwelling in like commnnion with 
 the Father. Therefore, as the Holy Spirit Avill teach yon only what He 
 hears from the Father, He can teach yon no other doctrine than mine." 
 
 But all the instruction and comfort Jcsns could administer; all the 
 warnings, on the one hand, of the diflicultics and sufferings, and all the 
 suj^ports on the other, in rich promises of power, help, and blessing from 
 above, could not dispel the sadness of the Apostles, or bring them joy and 
 coui*age. The near departure of their loved Master filled their minds with 
 abiding dejection and anxious fear. 
 
 In tender sympathy, therefore, Jesus once more sought to cheer them. 
 " I said, indeed," He went on, " that very soon you would see me no longer, 
 but j^et, a little while more, and yon ^vill see me again." 
 
 The Apostles were more than ever perplexed by these words. They 
 tliought only of an earthly communion with their Master, such as they still 
 enjoyed, and could not understand the sudden change of not seeing Him, 
 and seeing Him again, or the double use of the words, " A little while," or 
 what He meant by saying so often that He Avas going to the Father. 
 Wondering questions followed between them, and they were anxious to ask 
 an exjilanation, when Jesus, seeing their perplexity, anticipated their wish. 
 
 " Do you inquire among yourselves," said He, "what I mean by saying, 
 ' A little while, and ye will not see me : and, again, a little while, and ye 
 will see me ; ' and ' I am going to the Father ' ? Ye shall, indeed, be in 
 great trouble at my death, for I am presently to die, though you seem as 
 if you could not credit it. Indeed, ye will be sad, when the world that 
 rejects me will rejoice. But your sorrow will be turned into joy, as sudden 
 as that of the mother when she bears a son, and forthwith forgets the past 
 for gladness that a man is born into the world ; for you know that no joy 
 is so great to a woman, in our nation, as that of having a son. So you 
 will, indeed, have sorrow now at my death, but it will pass into abiding 
 joy, when you see me again in my spiritual return. 
 
 " In that day the Spirit of Truth will have given you such a full and 
 satisfjnng knowledge of all that concerns me and my Kingdom, that you 
 will have no need, as now, to ask me respecting any words or matters you 
 do not understand. You will no longer miss my earthly presence, but be 
 joyful in the possession of full enlightenment. For most truly do I assure 
 you, that all you ask my Father in my name— all illumination, all gifts and 
 joys of the Spirit— He will give you. Hitherto, from want of insight and 
 experience, you have asked nothing in my name, and therefore have, as yet, 
 no dream of the boundless gifts your Father in Heaven is ready to give 
 you, or of the fulness of His comforting and supporting grace. Hence- 
 forth, ask in my name and you will receive what you ask, that your joy 
 may be complete. 
 
 " I have spoken in figures, and darkly, of my going away, and of your 
 seeing me again, and of what would flow from it. But a time comes when 
 I will no more speak to you in this way, but will instruct you clearly and 
 plainly, through the Spirit, respecting the Father. In that day ye shall 
 ask in my name, because you will then be enlightened by the Spirit of 
 Truth, and you will not need that I intercede for you that your prayers.
 
 CG6 THE LirE or ciiiust. 
 
 tliua offered, may bo beard ; for tbe Fatbcr Himself loves yon bceausc yon 
 bavo loved me, and bavc believed tliat I came forth from Him, and He will 
 therefore hear yon without any intercession. Nor must you ever forget 
 this great truth — the sum of my life and work — that I came forth from 
 the Father to appear in the world, and now leave the world to go back to 
 Him ao;ain." 
 
 The discipleSj listening to these words, fancied they now understood, in 
 part at least, what had before seemed so dark. They had at least realized, 
 from His last sentence, that as He had come forth from God, and was aljout 
 to return to Him, He must be going to heaven. Perhaps they thought, in 
 their simple way, that they also understood better what He had said about 
 their seeing Him again. It seemed as if He had, already, fulfilled His 
 promise to them to speak clearly and without metaphor. That He should, 
 moreover, have knoAvn the still unuttercd questions they had in their 
 hearts, so astonished them, that they felt sure He was omniscient, and did 
 not need any one to ask Him, but could interpret their thoughts without 
 having been told them. Awed and vividly impressed, they had a fresh 
 corroboration of their belief in Him, as having come forth from God, and 
 hastened to tell Him their strengthened conviction. 
 
 "Is it so, that you are now sure you believe in me?" asked Jesus. 
 " An hour is coming, and indeed has come, when your faith will have a 
 hard test. Will you stand firm ? Alas ! how soon will you waver ; for in 
 that hour you will be scattered, each to his own home, and leave me alone ! 
 Yet," added He, after a pause, in calm and clear assurance that, though 
 forsaken of man, He would have the helping and protecting presence of 
 the Father, " yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me." 
 
 " I have sj)okeu as I have," He continued ; " have given you these con- 
 solations and promises, that you might have rest and peace in me, by com- 
 munion with me as the loving and loved. In the world, indeed, affliction 
 is your lot, for men will hate and persecute you, as I have said, for my 
 sake ; but be of good heart, I have conquered and broken the might of the 
 world and its prince, and they can neither hinder your salvation, nor 
 check the triumph of my Kingdom." 
 
 The farewell discourse was ended with this note of triumph, " I have 
 conquered the world ! " But now, before He went forth into the night, so 
 big with fate, He could not break up for ever the communion He had had 
 with them so long, through joy and sorrow, without gathering them round 
 Him in a parting prayer. He was about to die for the redemption of the 
 world, and, as the Great High Priest of humanity, would make interces- 
 sion, before yielding Himself up to sacrifice. I venture, reverently, to 
 amplify the expression, that the import may be more easily caught. 
 
 Lifting up His eyes to heaven — the Apostles standing, as the manner of 
 their nation was, while He prayed— He began, "Father, the hour of my 
 death has now come. Glorify Thy Son on the completion of the work of 
 salvation, that Thy Son may glorify Thee as its author, before man. 
 Glorify Him, in accordance with Thy will, by which Thou hast given Him 
 power over all men ; for Thou hast appointed Him the only Saviour and 
 ■Redeemer, to carry out Thy gracious purpose of salvation towards the
 
 THE FAREWELL. 667 
 
 world; that He should give eternal life to all whom Thou hast givcu Him. 
 And this is everlasting life, that they should know Thee, the only true God, 
 and Him whom Thou hast sent — me, Jesus, the Messiah. I have glorified 
 Thee on earth, for I have made known Thy name. Thy v/ill, and Thy plan 
 of salvation for man, and have thus completed the work Thou hast given 
 me to do. Therefore, glorify me now, Father, when I rise from my work 
 on earth into Thy presence in heaven, with the glory which I had with Thee 
 before the world was. Let me enter again into that Divine communion in 
 Thine uncreated glory, which I had before the creation of the world ! " 
 
 He had, till now, prayed for Himself. He passed next to intercession 
 for His discijiles, urging His faithful obedience to His Divine mission, as 
 a ground for His being heard. 
 
 " I have made known Thy name xinto the men whom Thou hast given 
 jne out of the unbelieving world. They were Thine own, for they were of 
 Thy true Israel, and Thou gavest them to me, and faithfully and tridy did 
 they receive my words as Thine, and they have kept them. In much they 
 may have failed to understand, but they have been sincere and firm in their 
 belief in me, as having been sent by Thee, and as speaking Thy truth. 
 Now, also, they have learned to know, and do acknowledge, that all Thou 
 hast given me — all that I have said and done — is, as indeed it is, from Thee ! 
 
 " I pray for them. I pray not now for those who know Thee not, the 
 unbelieving world, but for Thine own, here in Thy presence — Thine own, 
 whom Thou hast given me. My whole life and work has been, and is, a 
 prayer for the world at large, from which my people must be gathered, 
 but I pray now for these, Thy servants, because they are Thine, though 
 Thou hast given them to me. And all things that are mine arc also Thine, 
 and Thine are mine ; the work, the aim, the means, the power, the grace, 
 are alike mine and Thine, for I am in Thee and Thou in me. Thy Will, 
 Eternal Father, is ever mine, my work also is Thine ; Thou in me and I in 
 Thee, and thus, though all things are Thine, I am glorified in them. 
 Greatly do these. Thy servants, need Thy help, for I, their friend, am about 
 to leave them, but they remain in the world that hates them for my sake. 
 "Without Thy heavenly aid and protection, they will not be able to do the 
 work Thou hast appointed them. Therefore, Holy Father, keep them true 
 to Thy name, which Thou gavest me to make known to them, that by their 
 common faith and love they may be one, as Thou and I are one. While I 
 was in the world, I watched and protected those whom Thou thus com- 
 mittedst to my care, and kept them faithful to Thy name— kept them 
 from the evil one, from denying Thee, from falling away from Thee — and 
 none of them has perished but the son of perdition, for the Scripture must 
 be fulfilled. Thou must watch and keep them, now that I shall leave them ! 
 
 " But now I come to Thee, and these things I speak, being yet in the 
 world, that they may have, in their own souls, the perfect joy that is in 
 mine, feeling assured confidence that the grave will not have dominion 
 over me, and that they will have Thee for their helper. I have given them 
 Thy word, and the world has hated them for receiving it ; because they do 
 not belong to the world, as I do not. Therefore, O Father, kcejD them ! I 
 ask not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world because it hatea
 
 668 THE LIFE OP CIlllIST. 
 
 them; for suffcrlug and straggle are needed to I'jcrfect their sph'itual life, 
 and to sjaread abi'oad ray Kingdom. But lasktliat Thou shouldcst protect 
 them from the evil one, that they, too, become not sons of perdition. They, 
 like me, are not of the world, for it is the kingdom of the evil one ; there- 
 fore, they need Thy protecting care, and, as Thine own, will surely have it. 
 
 "Thou hast brought them out from amidst the unbelieving and hostile 
 Avorld, and liasfc given them to me, and they have received, and kept Thy 
 Word, made known to them by me. Thus they live in the Truth, for Thy 
 Word is Truth ; sanctify them in this, the sphere of their new spiritual 
 life ; not only keej) them in it, but consecrate and jirepare them for their 
 great work, by giving them, through the Spirit of holiness and truth 
 Divine enlightenment, power, boldness, love, zeal. Even as Thou didst 
 send me into the world, but didst first consecrate me by the Spirit, given 
 without measure, that I might accomplish the work Thou gavest me to do, 
 I liave also sent them into the world, and tliey, O Father, need a similar 
 consecration, in Thine own measure, to prosper in Thy work. 
 
 "For their sakes I consecrate myself to Thee, in my death, as a holy 
 offering — for I am both high priest and sacrifice ; that they, also, may be 
 made holy in the Truth, by Thy Spirit, the Helper whom Thou wilt send, 
 because I, the Holy One, have thus died for them. 
 
 " But I pray not for these. Thy servants now before Thee, alone, but for 
 all them, also, who will henceforth believe in me, through their word, that 
 they all, teachers, believers, and converts, may Ije one, in mutual fellow- 
 ship and communion of love ; the copy of that between Thee, Father, and 
 me ; communion so deep and holy that Thou art in me, and I in Thee. 
 May they 1je, thus, one in each other, by being one in Us, by loving vital 
 communion with Thee and me, that the unbelieving world may have a 
 visible proof, and may believe that Thou didst send me, the source, the 
 centre, the stay of such heavenly love. 
 
 " That all who shall now or hereafter believe in me, may be thus one in 
 holy love and life, even as We are One— I have given them, as their 
 future inheritance, at my coming in my eternal Kingdom, ]mrt in that 
 heavenly glory which Thou hast given me ; that they may share it with 
 me for ever. I have given it them, that they may be one, even as We ai'e 
 One ; for how strong must it be as a bond of unitj^ that they are heirs 
 together of the same glory with me in heaven. I have given it them that 
 they may thus ho perfectly joined in one, I dwelling in them and Thou in 
 me, that the world may know that Thou hast sent me, and hast loved them 
 with the same Father's love with which Thou hast loved me, and may 
 thus believe on me, the Saviour of the world. 
 
 " Father, I will that they whom Thou hast given me, from all the gener- 
 ations of men, be with me hereafter, to enjoy eternal life and everlasting 
 communion with me in that heavenly world whither I am now going. It 
 is the high reward of their faithfulness, their supreme consolation amidst 
 all earthly trials, their glorious animating hope. I will that their joy may 
 be full, in seeing and sharing my heavenly glory, as they have seen and 
 shared my humiliation on earth— that glory with Thyself, which Thou 
 hast given me because Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.
 
 THE AEREST. G69 
 
 " Kigliteous Father, I know that Thou wilt carry out this my will ; for, 
 though the world has not known or acknowledged Thee, as revealed iu my 
 words and deeds, I have known Thee, as working in me, aud revealing 
 Thyself through me — known Thee by direct immediate knowledge — and 
 these, Thy servants before Thee, having opened their hearts, and received 
 my word, have known and believed that Tliou hast sent me. I have made 
 known unto them Thy Name, and will make ib known through the Spirit 
 whom I will send ; that the love wherewith Thou hast loved me, Thoii 
 mayest also make dwell in their hearts, and that I, by the Spirit, may 
 dwell in them for ever." 
 
 How sublimely this prayer was realized in the history of the Apostles, 
 the " Acts " and the EjDistles abundantly illustrate. It was their common 
 glory to believe that nothing could separate them from the love of God in 
 Christ ; that He, by His Spirit, was with them, and that through His help 
 they overcame all that opposed. The contrast between the dejected, 
 faint-hearted, materializing Galiljean fishermen and peasants of the Gos- 
 pels, and the heroic, spiritual confessors of Pentecost and after-times, is, 
 itself, a miracle, great beyond all others. The illumination of soul, the 
 grandeur of conception, the loftiness of aim, are a transformation from a 
 lower to an indefinitely higher mental and moral condition, as complete as 
 the change from early twilight to noon, and find their only solution in the 
 admission that they must have i-eceived the miraculous spiritual enlighten- 
 ment from above which Jesus had promised to send them. 
 
 CHAPTER LX. 
 
 THE ahhest. 
 
 WHILE Jesus was tendei-ly bidding farewell to His few followers in 
 the upper room, all was bustle and excitement among the Church 
 authorities, now on the track of His blood by the help of Judas. 
 
 It was the great holiday of the year at Jerusalem ; the week in which, 
 beyond any other time, the whole population gave themselves up to re- 
 joicing. The citizens, from the highest to the lowest, were reaping the 
 great golden harvest of the year from the myriads of pilgrims, aiid they, 
 on their side, had the excitement of numbers, and novelty, and religious 
 enthusiasm. A mei'e mountain city, Jerusalem lived by the Temple, 
 either directly or indirectly, and it was now the loadstone that had drawn 
 the whole Jewish world around it. 
 
 With the craft that habitually marked him, the tetrarch Antipas had I 
 come up from Tiberias, to show how devoutly he honoured the Law, aud I 
 had taken his residence in the old castle of the Asmoneans, which still 
 remained in the hands of his family. It was near the Xystus, and exactly 
 opposite the Temple, to which he could cross by the upper bridge, over the 
 Tyropoeon Yalley between Zion and Moriah. 
 
 Pilate, also, had arrived from Cassarea, to secure, in person, the prcser- | 
 vation of order iu the dangerous days of the feast. His quarters Avere in 
 the new palace, built by Herod the Great on Zion. It was the pride of
 
 670 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Jerusalem. " The kinds of stone used in its construction," says Josoplms, 
 " Avere countless. YVhatcver was rare abounded in it. The roofs aston- 
 islied every one by the length of their beams and the beauty of their 
 adornment. "Vessels, mostly of gold and silver, rich in chasing, shone on 
 every side. The great dining-hall had been constructed to su]iply table- 
 couches for three hundred guests. Others opened in all directions, each 
 with a different style of pillar. The open space before the palace was laid 
 out in broad walks, planted with long avenues of different trees, and 
 bordered by broad deep canals and great ponds, flowing with cool, clear 
 water, and set off along the banks with innumerable works of art." It was 
 the vast citadel-palace in which the tragedies of the family of Herod had 
 been enacted. Here Archelaus had reigned, and Glaphyra had died. By 
 right of war, the Romans had taken it, as the chief building of the city, 
 for the residence of the procurators, and had made it the Pra3torium, or 
 head-quarters. Its enclosure —large enough to permit almost an army to 
 be gathered in it, if necessary — ran along the inner side of the first city 
 wall, and was connected with the great castles of white stone, Mariamnc, 
 Hippicus, and Phasaelus, which Herod had built ; the whole constituting, 
 in fact, a vast fortification. 
 
 The high priest at the time of the Passover, as we have seen, was 
 Caiaphas. The real head of the priesthood, however, was the crafty 
 Hannas, or Ananus, without whom nothing of moment was done in the 
 affairs of tlie theocracy. As father of the greatest Sadducean family, he 
 was fitly notorious for his harsh judgments, and was presently to take the 
 chief part in the death of Jesus, as his son afterwards did in that of St, 
 James. He had been ajapointed high priest by Quirinius in the year a.d. 
 7, but had been deprived of the dignity seven years later by Valerius 
 Gratus. The unique honour was reserved to him, however, of seeing his 
 five sons successively pontiffs — one of them twice — a distinction which, 
 in later years, gained for him, among his countrymen, the name of the 
 most fortunate of men. 
 
 Intrigue and unwearied plotting were the very life of Hannas and his 
 house. The gliding, deadly, snakclike smootluioss with which tlicy seized 
 their prey was a wonder even to their own generation, and had given them 
 a by-name as hissing vijaers. When Quirinius, after the census, degraded 
 the high jiricst Joazer, who had brought on himself universal hatred by 
 his services to tlie Eomans, Hannas was chosen as the one of the Temple 
 aristocracy least displeasing either to the Eomans or the Jcavs. He had 
 managed to maintain his influence with three procurators through difficult 
 times. Under Valerius Gratus, he was forced to give way to Ismacl Ben 
 Phabi, but, after a jcar, had had him displaced, in favour of Eleazar, one 
 of his own sons. He himself declined to hold the office again, on the same 
 ground which Jonathan, another of his sons, afterwards pleaded, in the 
 days of Herod Agrippa, when that king wislicd him to take it a second time. 
 The family, though loose enough in more serious matters, were very strict 
 as to hierarchical order. ISTo one, they held, shoiild resume the sacred 
 vestments after having once laid them off, and released himself from the 
 oljligations imposed by wearing them. Hannas bowed to this rule, as vital
 
 THE ARREST. G71 
 
 to the theocratic constitution, by the help of which his house stood at the 
 head of Israel. He chose, therefore, henceforth to hold the reins only iu 
 safe obscurity, but with a firm hand. 
 
 His sons, Eleazar, Jonathan, Theoplulus, lEatthias, and Haunas, succes- 
 sively became high priests ; but when, at his death, the leading spirit was 
 gone, the l^rutality of the Saddncee came more prominently into play, and 
 speedily led to the ruin of the house. 
 
 Among the high priests who had interrupted the direct reign of this 
 family, Caiaphas, son-in-law of Hannas, ruled longest. At the time of tlio 
 condemnation of Jesus he had held the hign priesthood for seTcntccn 
 years, having given Pilate no excuse for setting him aside, in spite of the 
 conflict respecting the eagles, the shields, and the conduits of Jerusalem. 
 He even retained it till after the great day, in the year a.d. 36, when the 
 sacred vestments, so long held from them, were handed over by Vitellius 
 permanently to the Jews, instead of being given out to them from the strong 
 room of Antonia, a week before each great feast, for seven days' purifica- 
 tions, washings, and consecrations, to free them from heathen defilement, 
 before they could be worn. CaiajDhas, however, had little to do with pro- 
 curing this great favour, and was deposed almost immediately after; 
 Jonathan, the son of Hannas, being appointed in his stead. 
 
 Thus, at the time of the condemnation of Jesus, the acting high priest 
 was only a puppet in the hands of a powerful family, at the head of which 
 stood Hannas, his father-in-law, sorely envied by the rest of the priestly 
 aristocracy. 
 
 Jewish tradition descril)es the grades of the ancient hierarchy as con- 
 sisting of the high priest ; his deputy, or Sagan ; two suffragans of the 
 Sagan ; seven priests, to whom were entrusted the keys of the Temple ; 
 and three treasurers, whose office it was to give out l^the sacred vessels. 
 Of those holdinc; these offices when Jesus w^as condemned, we can still 
 darkly make out some. With Caiaphas, at his right hand, sat Hannas, 
 the titular second, but real head. Jochanan Ben Zacchai, called John iu 
 the Acts of the Apostles, and one Alexander, seem to have held the next 
 dignities, and after them ca.m.e the five sons of Hannas, already an old 
 man, Eleazar, Jonathan, Tlieophilus, Matthias, and Hannas — the five 
 apparently hinted at in the aw^ful parable of Dives— and his five brothers, 
 all to be high priests hereafter, Hannas, the younger, destined to stain his 
 pontificate by the murder of James, the brother of Jesus. 
 
 The names of some other members of what we may call the self-con- 
 stituted high ecclesiastical council, still survive. Among these were 
 Joazcr and Eleazar, the sons of that Simon Bocthus of Alexandria, whose 
 daughter, the second Mariamne, the belle of Jerusalem, was married by 
 Herod. Simon, though well-nigh a heretic in the eyes of the national 
 party, had been made high priest by his royal son-in-law, and his sons had 
 succeeded him in the dignity, but bore an evil name for their state and 
 violence. Their guard of spearmen, indeed, became an object of jiopular 
 hatred. Simon, surnamed Kanthera, " the Quarrelsome," — the murderer 
 of St. James the son of Zebcdee — and his son Elioneus, afterwards high 
 priest, had a right to attend, and did so with a pomp which brought on the
 
 672 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 family the ciirso of the people,— " Woe to your fine feathers, ye family of 
 Kanthera ! " Ismael Ben Phabi, the handsomest man of his day, Avas 
 another mitred high counsellor, to be famed hereafter for the clubs and 
 blows of his serving men, the greed of his bailiffs, his shameless nepotism, 
 and the Oriental luxury of his dress, one outer tunic of which cost a hun- 
 dred minee — equal, perhaps, at this day, to eighteen hundred pounds. 
 There were, also, Johanan Ben Nebedai, the jDersecutor of St. Paul, in- 
 famous in latter days as a sensual glutton, who seized even the holy 
 sacrifices for his feasts : and Issachar, of Kefar Barkai, who, in his pontifi- 
 cate of a latter day, would not sacrifice except in silk gloves, for fear of 
 soiling his hands, but lived to have those hands barbarously cut off by 
 King Agrippa. Such were the men about to seize Jesus. No wonder that 
 even the Talmud relates that voices were heard from the Holy of Holies, 
 crying, " Depart from the Temple, ye sons of Eli ; ye defile the house of 
 Jehovah ! " 
 
 The elders of the people— a body equivalent to a Jewish senate— were in 
 no less agitation respecting Christ; for they, also, were identified with the 
 preservation of things as they were. One or two of them — Nicodemus, and 
 Joseph of Arimathea — were secretly in his favour, but they had not moral 
 courage to take his part openly. The names of the rest have perished. 
 
 The college of Rabbis took an equally vigorous part, but its members 
 at this time can only be guessed, though some who had met the boy Jesus, 
 twenty years before, in the Temple school, doubtless survived. 
 
 It was late in the night of Thursday when Jesus had ended His last 
 discourse and farewell prayer. According to the immemorial custom of 
 the nation to mingle songs of i:)raise to God with their feasts, the little 
 band had already sung the first two of the six Psalms— the one hundred 
 and thirteenth to one hundred and eighteenth— which formed the great 
 Hallelujah of the Passover and all other feasts. The stillness of the night 
 had been broken by the sound at the time when the second cup had been 
 poured out. Now, at the close, the voices of the eldest of them chanted, 
 with slow, solemn strains, the remainder of the Hallelujah— the rest 
 responding with the word, Hallelujah, at the close of each verse, The 
 anthem began fitly — " Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy name give 
 glory, for Thy mercy, and for Thy truth's sake," and closed with the words 
 of the hundred and eighteenth Psalm — "Blessed be He that cometh iu the 
 name of Jehovah;" the Apostles responding — "in the name of Jehovah, 
 Hallelujah ! " And now all was over, and the Eleven, f olloAving their Master, 
 went out into the night. They were on their way to Gethsemane. 
 
 The spirit of Jesus had, hitherto, been calm and serene. But the final 
 close, the break with all the past, the shadow, deeper than that of Kedron, 
 before Him, for the time brought on a reaction, which, till it passed, over- 
 whelmed Him with trouble. No wonder the Apostles had been cast down 
 when even He who had been exhorting them to dismiss soi*row, was Him- 
 self moved. Behind Him lay life, before Him death; He v.'as about to 
 leave friends, and the fair earth, which, as a man. He loved so well, and 
 His infant Church, the hope of the world He had come to save. Before 
 Him lay, not only natural death, but shame, derision, misconception. He
 
 THE ARREST. G73 
 
 whose -whole sonl was truth, was to be crucified as a deceiver ; the One on 
 earth absolutely loyal to God, He was to die as a blasphemer. Loaded 
 willi false charges and feeling their baseless malignance, He was to be put 
 to death on the ground of them ! How might it affect the little band, to 
 ■whom the future of His kingdom was entrusted ? He had hitherto re- 
 strained Himself from using His supernatural power in His own behalf — 
 would He still do so ? He had but to speak, and all would be changed ; 
 for He who could calm tlie waves of the sea, could quell the tumult of the 
 people, and what were Temple guards or Roman soldiei'S against legions 
 of angels ? Would He still absolutely subordinate all thought of self ? 
 Would He, to the end, let men do with Him as they pleased, though Ho 
 had at His command all the powers of heaven ? Tlie temptation of the 
 desert and of the mountain may, for a moment, have returned, and who 
 can tell the struggle it must have been to overcome it ? 
 
 Nor was even this all. The mj'stcries of the Divine counsels must be 
 for ever unknown, but they pressed, in all their weight, on His absolutely 
 sinless soul. He was to give His life a ransom for man ; to be made an 
 offei'ing for sin, though He knew none ; to be repaid for infinite love and 
 goodness by ignominy and shame. Perfect innocence freely yielding itself 
 to misconception and death, for the unworthy and vile, would be transcen- 
 dant even in a man, but is beyond thought in the Son of God. Who can tell 
 what it was to have left the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens to 
 stoop to Calvary ! — for Him who could raise the dead to descend to the tomb ! 
 No wonder His human soul was for the moment eclipsed and clouded. 
 
 They passed, silent and sad, down the steep side of the Kedron — for the 
 town gate was open that night, as it was Passover — and, crossing by the 
 bridge, were on the road which leads over the Mount of Olives to Bethany. 
 The noise of the multitude had passed away, and the world lay asleep 
 under the great Passover-moon. The path wound between stone-walled 
 orchards and gardens, which Titus was, hereafter, to find so many deadly 
 battle-grounds, with the walls for ramjoarts. He had gone out of the city, 
 each night, to Bethany, but had no intention of doing so now, for He knew 
 that His hour had come. Always given to solitary prayer among the hills 
 so dear to Him as a Galila3an, He had often turned aside to commune with 
 His Father on one part or other of Olivet, and, this night, chose the still- 
 ness and shade of a spot which His presence made, henceforth, sacred for 
 ever. An olive orchard lay near, known by the name of the Oil-press— or, 
 as we are accustomed to think of it, Gethsemane. It was called so from a 
 rock-hewn trough in it, in which the rich olives were trodden with the 
 feet, the oil flowing into a similar ti'ough below. The new leaves were 
 opening over the branches as they passed, and the moonlight fell through 
 their motionless network on the tender spring grass. Stillness, peace, 
 solitude, filled earth and air ; even the birds slept safely on the bouglis 
 under the great sky ; for they, too, had a Heavenly Father. Moriah rose 
 m richly wooded terraces behind, crowned with the snow-white Temple in 
 its magnificence and, in front, the yellow slopes of Olivet rising from their 
 border of gardens and orchards, swelled between them and the loved 
 cottage of Bethany. 
 
 X X
 
 G74 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Amidst tliis quiet and beauty o£ nature Jesus turned aside, and entered 
 the enclosure of Gethsemauc, to strengthen His soul for the coming crisis. 
 It was a fitting place— amidst olives, the emljlems of peace ! 
 
 A square, stone-walled garden, close by the path to Betliany, on the edge 
 of the Kedron ravine, under the shadow of the Temple hill, is still shown 
 as the spot. Yenerable olive-trees, tended with suj^crstitious care, arc 
 claimed as the very witnesses of our Saviour's agony ; but it is fatal to the 
 belief in the tradition, that Titus afterwards cut down all the trees round 
 Jerusalem, for military use, and that the same fate has befallen the whole 
 neighbourhood in later sieges. But the gnarled trunks, twenty to thirty 
 feet high, the broad branches, and the still seclusion, at least reproduce the 
 outward features of the scene. 
 
 When the soul is overwhelmed it seeks to be alone, and yet not too far 
 from human sympathy and help. To take all the Eleven with Him into 
 the depths of the garden, would have invaded the sacredness of His retire- 
 ment. Only three, the most trusted— His long-tried and early followers, 
 Peter, whose guest He had been in the bright Capernaum days, and James 
 and John, knit to Him by special tenderness, if not even by relationshij) — 
 were allowed to go with Him beyond the first few steps into the enclosiire. 
 The others were to sit down and rest, while He went into the deeper shade, 
 to pray. 
 
 Accompanied by the Three, He passed out of hearing of the rest, and 
 presently, leaving even the Three behind, with the words, " My soul is ex- 
 ceeding sorrowful, even unto death — tarry ye here and watch with mc ; " 
 He went on about a stone's cast, alone. And, now, the great pent up sorrow 
 burst forth. It had been gathering, no one knows how long, but the excite- 
 ment of action had repressed it as yet — as the vfind keeps a heavy raincloud 
 from breaking. But, here, instead of the city and its multitudes of men, 
 there was silence and loneliness ; instead of the distractions of conflict 
 with enemies, or discourses with friends, He was face to face with His own 
 thoughts, and v/ith the Past and the Future, and that in the night, and in 
 such awful isolation. For it seemed as if even heaven were as far from Him 
 ~as the sympathy of earth ; as if even its lights had gone out, and He was tread- 
 ing the valley of the shadow of death in a horror of thick darkness. Must 
 He bear all ? Must the cup be drunk to the dregs ? Was redemption pos- 
 sible only at the awful price that so oppressed His soul ? Could the hour 
 not pass? Was it not possible for the Eternal Father to save Him from it ? 
 
 The sacred writers labour to describe the agony that overwhelmed Him. 
 They tell us that He first kneeled, then fell on His face on the earth, and 
 prayed with strong crying and tears, till His sweat became, as it were, great 
 drops of blood, falling dovm to the ground. He was " exceeding sorrowful," 
 '■ sore amazed," "very heavy." His soul, as it were, sank under the vision 
 that rose before it. " my Father," He cried, " if it be possible, let this 
 cup pass from, me ; nevertheless, not my will, but Thine, be done." But 
 as long as there was a struggle of the frail human nature, and a cry, how- 
 ever reverent and lowly, for change, if possible, in the burden laid on Him, 
 there could be no peace. Eising fi'om the ground, in His agony of spirit, 
 human sympathy and presence seemed as if they would be a relief. He
 
 THE ABEEST. 675 
 
 came tliereforo to the Three, but ouly to fiud tliat, in His long, wrestling 
 supplications, even they, His nearest ones, overcome by weariness of body 
 and spirit, lay sunk in deep sleep. Rousing Peter, lately so boastful, He 
 gently reproved and warned him, and with him, the others. "What ! could 
 you not watch with me one hour ? Watch, and pray as ye do so, that ye 
 may not expose yourselves to temptation to be untrue to me, and to be of- 
 fended at me, as I have said you would. The spirit indeed is willing to 
 stand by me faithfully, but human nature, with its instinct of self-preser- 
 vation, is weak, and if you heed not, will make you fall ! " 
 
 Leaving them again, He once more prostrated Himself in prayer ; but 
 the clouds were already breaking, for His whole being had returned to its 
 habitual harmony with the will of God. Every desire or wish of His own 
 was passing like a troubled dream. " my Father," cried He now, " if 
 this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it. Thy will be done." 
 Perfect peace of soul can only be found iu absolute submission to the One 
 Supreme Will, and that He was fast attaining. Eeturning to the Three — 
 who knows for what ? — He found them asleep again. They were losing, by 
 their hour's sloth, the opportunity of cheering and helping their Master in 
 His sorest trial. Man had thus failed Him, but the need of human comfort 
 was passing away. Retiring, therefore, once more, and prostrating Him- 
 Belf a third time, the same calm child-like submission to His Father again 
 rose from His lips. He had triumphed. He had been heard iu that He 
 feared. He no longer craved a change, even if possible, in the ordered 
 course of the Divine pui'poses ; His earnest cry had passed into still sub- 
 mission; His intense desire into holy acquiescence. He thought no longer 
 of Himself, but of the perfect love and wisdom of the Father. He had 
 ceased to have a wish ; enough for Him, henceforth the all-holy, all-Avise, 
 all-loving will of the Father. His spirit had broken through the cloud 
 that for a moment darkened it, and reposed once more in the calm light of 
 the face of God. The tempter had fled, and, in his place, as after the vic- 
 tory of the wilderness, we are told by St. Luke, "there appeared an angel 
 unto Him from Heaven, strengthening Him." 
 
 Meanwhile, Judas had been busy. Exposed, and dismissed by his 
 Master from the company of the Apostles, he had only been the more set 
 to carry out his miserable purpose. Hastening through the illuminated 
 streets, to the authorities, he had, forthwith, reported that the favourable 
 moment seemed to have come. Jesus had once more ventured into Jeru- 
 salem, a7id though it might not be safe to take Him in the thronged city, 
 it would be easy to come upon Him outside the walls, as He was in the 
 habit of going each night for prayer to a spot at the foot of the Mount of 
 Olives. The traitor meant Gethsemane. 
 
 The authorities remained in permanent session till the aiTest was 
 effected, and at once detached part of the Temple Watch, a body acting as 
 the police of the Temple, and armed at most, only, with wooden batons or 
 clubs. The officers of the watch, and even some of the chief priests and 
 eldei's, in their excitement, accompanied them. It had been thought un- 
 wise, however, to trust so grave a matter to an undisciplined and weak 
 force, and the high priest had, therefore, communicated with Pilate, repre-
 
 676 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 senting, doubtless, that lie proposed the arrest of a false Messiah, dangerous 
 to the Eoman power, and feared a rescue. A " band " had, therefore, been 
 told off from the troops in Antonia, and these, under the chiliarch in com- 
 mand of the garrison, waited their orders. A rabble of the servants of the 
 upper priests and chief men, with lanterns and torches, to discover Jesus 
 should He try to hide Himself, led the way, behind Judas, who went fore- 
 most as guide. It was the full moon of April, but the trees and recesses 
 might aid an attem^Dt at escape. 
 
 Jesus had just returned from His third prayer, and was rousing His 
 disciples, when he heard the noise of the soldiers and the crowd, and saw 
 their lights approaching. The disappointment, at even His most trusted 
 friends lying asleep when they should have watclicd, and leaving it to Him- 
 self to discover Judas and his band, wounded His heart. With keen but 
 gentle irony, therefore, He told them that they might sleep on now and 
 take their rest, if they chose ; their watching was no longer needed. His 
 hour had come. Then, speaking in a serious strain, He bade them " rise 
 and go out with Him, for the traitor was at hand." 
 
 Judas aiul his employers had utterly misjudged the character of Jesus. 
 Knowing all that was before Him, and now calmly victorious over momen- 
 tary human Aveakness, He did not wait for His enemies, but, taknig His dis- 
 ciples with Him, went out of the garden enclosure to meet them. "Whom 
 seek ye ? " said He as they approached. " Jesus, the Nazarene," answered 
 the foremost. To their confusion, the calm, self-possessed speaker presently 
 told them that He was Jesus. ISTot a few in the Jewish crowd gathered 
 befoi'e Him, had heard Him spoken of as a prophet, and had, perhaps, even 
 accepted Him as such. They had all heard of His mysterious supernatural 
 power, and He might, possibh', now use it against them, though hitlicrto 
 He had never availed Himself of it for personal ends. His kingly compo- 
 sure and dignity, moreover, awed them, for grandeur of soul and bearing 
 enforce acknowledgment. Withal, it may be, He revealed a momentai-y 
 glimjjse of His transfiguration splendour, to show that He freely surren- 
 dered Himself, because His hour had come. From whatever cause, the 
 crowd fell back in confusion, overturning each other in their alarm. "Whom 
 seek ye ? " asked Jesus once more. " Jesus, the Nazarene," muttered the 
 boldest. " I told you," replied He, "that I am He; if you seek me, let 
 these men, my disciples, go their way." He had said, that of those whom 
 the Father had given Him He had lost none, and even in an earthly sense, 
 He wonld now protect them. 
 
 Fear as jet paralyzed the crowd. Jesus had calmly owned Himself, but 
 no one dared to lay hold of Him. Judas, still under the Aveird spell of 
 evil, might well dread that all would miscai^ry. He had given a signal by 
 which to know his late Master, reckoning on having to point Him out, and 
 would now embolden those with him, by himself taking the first step in 
 further action. He had arranged that he should mark Jesus to them, by 
 going up to Him and giving Him the customary kiss of a disciple to his 
 teacher. Stepping out, therefore, from the crowd, into the circle of the 
 disciples, as one of their number, he approached with a hypocritical "Hail, 
 Eabbi," and kissed Him tenderly. He knew, by long experience, that he
 
 THE AREEST. 677 
 
 might do so safely. To the cahn aud keen question of Jesus — " Good 
 friend, for what have you come ? " — he returned no answer ; for what 
 answer could he give? But he had gained his end; for those behind, 
 encouraged by his remaining uninjured after such treachery, laid hold of 
 Christ and bound Him without the least resistance on His part. 
 
 ISTow follov/ed the only act of violence ; for Peter, impetuous as he was 
 brave, could not see his Master thus led away, a prisoner, without a word 
 or act on the part of His friends. '' Lord, shall we smite them with the 
 sword?" cried he; and without waiting an answer, or thinking of the 
 hopelessness of a rescue, or of the odds against himself alone, he drew the 
 sword he had hung by his side, and made a fierce cut at one of the servants 
 of the high priest, fortunately only grazing the skull, but yet cutting off 
 an ear. It was a splendidly heroic act, but sadly out of place under such 
 a Teacher. Turnin» to the wounded man, and at the same moment rebuk- 
 ing Peter, Jesus checked any evil results from the brave attack, by soft 
 words and an effacement of the injury done. " Suffer thus far," said He, 
 and then touched the ear, and healed it. Forthwith, turning to Peter, He 
 told him to sheathe the sword. " He who uses violence," added He, " will 
 suffer violence. If you use the sword, you expose all your lives to danger. 
 Shall I not drink the cup which my Father hath given me ? Shall I hesi- 
 tate to jilease Him ? If I wished to escape suffering, Peter, dost thou not 
 know that I could ask my Father, and He would send me, instead of your 
 help, twelve legions of angels— a legion for each of you — to protect me ? 
 But, then, that would not happen which the Scriptures have foretold I 
 must undergo." 
 
 The disciples, after the first impulsive thought, had abandoned all idea 
 of resistance ; and as any attempt to rescue Jesus was clearly hopeless, 
 since He did not put forth His supernatural power on His own behalf, and 
 would not let them'do anything ; and as they themselves seemed in danger, 
 through the impetuosity of Peter; all took to flight as soon as they saw 
 their Master fairly in the hands of His enemies. 
 
 The intense excitement of the hierarchy had broken through all re- 
 straints of official dignity. The proposal for the arrest had been too im- 
 portant a matter to be trusted to any underlings, and hence, some of the 
 head priests and of the " elders " had joined the leaders of the Temple 
 police in the wild march to Gethsemane. Surrounded on all sides, and 
 firmly bound, as if His captors still feared that He would escape or be 
 rescued, Jesus now turned to these dignitaries, so sadly out of place in 
 such a scene, and calmly, but keenly, brought home to them their shame. 
 " You come out against me," said He, " as you might against a robber, or 
 the head of a rising, with swords and clubs. I sat, day by day, in the 
 Temple, teaching, in the thick of the people. You had every opportunity 
 for laying hold on me then, but you did nothing. The darkness of night is 
 fitted for your designs ; it is your hour ; the powers of evil work by choice 
 in the dark. But, in all this, there is no chance ; it happens only in accord- 
 ance with the predictions of the prophets." He said no more, and allowed 
 them to lead Him away. The disciples were scattered, but one form 
 hovered after them, white in the moonlight It was that of a young man,
 
 G78 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 wlio liad, apparently, been roused from sleep by the tumult, ami having 
 thrown his white linen sleeping cloth round him in liis haste, was following 
 Jesus towards the city. Who he was must remain for over unknown. 
 Was it Mark himself, who alone relates it ? Or one from the house jjro- 
 bably attached to Gethsemane? Some have supposed him to have been 
 Lazarus ; others have had different conjectures ; he was, at least, some 
 faithful heart, eager to see what they would do with his Lord, The 
 soldiers had let the Apostles flee, having no orders to arrest them ; but 
 this strange apparition attracted their attention, and they sought to lay 
 hold on him. Casting off the cloth around him, however, he escaped out 
 of their hands. 
 
 Yet there were friendly eyes following the sad scene, in the safe dark- 
 ness of the night. Peter, and another of the Apostles, who could only be 
 John, had fled no further than safety demanded, and followed the crowd 
 at a distance, unable to leave One they held so dear. 
 
 The great object with the authorities was to hurry forward the proceed- 
 ings against their prisoner so quickly, that they might hand Him over to 
 the Eomans as one already condemned, before the people could be roused 
 on His side. They had so far gained their point. 
 
 On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus was first led to the mansion of Hannas, 
 the head of the reigning priestly family, either in deference to his recog- 
 nised influence, or because, as the oldest high priest, he was still acknow- 
 ledged as the rightful, if not legal, dignitary. He could see Jesus, and 
 hear His defence, and advise his son-in-law how to act. His " snake-like " 
 craft might help the less acute Caiaphas. 
 
 What passed before Hannas, or what hints he sent to Caiaphas, are not 
 known. It may be that he simply passed on the prisoner to the legal high 
 piiest at once, hastening to follow Him, and secure His condemnation. 
 
 In the East, tlie houses of the great are rather a group of buildings or 
 chambers, of unequal height, near or aljove each other, with passages be- 
 tween, and intervening open spaces ; the different structures having in- 
 dependent entrances and separate roofs. Such a house, or rather cluster 
 of houses, has usually the form of a large hollow square, the four sides of 
 which surround a roomy coui't ; paved in some cases, in others, planted 
 with trees, and ornamented with a lawn of soft green. Sometimes, an 
 underground cistern, a spring, or a bath, offers the luxury of abundant 
 water, and makes the court an agreeable spot for relaxation or refresh- 
 ment. Porticos and galleries surround it, and furnish chambers for guests 
 and entertainments. In some houses there is also a forecourt, enclosed 
 from the street by walls, and, in all, the inner court is reached by an arch- 
 way through the front building — "the porch," in the narrative of the 
 Gospels. 
 
 The hierai'chical party were in permanent session in the mansion or 
 "palace" of Caiaphas. A commission, consisting mainly of the chief 
 priests, with Caiaphas at their head, had been appointed, to await the 
 result of the treachery of Judas ; for the whole party, in its alarm, had 
 extemporized joint action, though their taking any judicial steps at all was 
 irregular, for they formed no legal court or recognised tribunal. They
 
 THE JEWISH TEIAL. 679 
 
 were simply acting as a self -constituted body — partisans of established 
 ecclesiastical order, and defenders of their own vested rights — gathered 
 at the summons of the high jiriest, in the blind excitement of fanaticism 
 and passion, without rules of judicial proceeding or legal standing as a 
 court. The chief Rabbis of the school of Hillel generally kept aloof from 
 svich tumultuous and violent proceedings, which were already too common, 
 and left tliem to those of the fierce school of Shammai, and to the merciless 
 Sadducees. The name Sanhedrim is given in the Gospels to sucii extem- 
 porized assemblies, the word meaning only "an assembly." But they do 
 not use it as the title of a legal tribunal. It was before a mob of digni- 
 taries, not a " court," that Jesus was brought. 
 
 The commission were awaiting the arrival of their prey, in the hoiise of 
 Caiaphas, who, as high priest, was the only representative of Judaism 
 recognised by the Romans, and, therefore, the only one who could hold 
 official relations with Pilate, to ask him to carry out their predetermined 
 resolution to put Jesus to death. 
 
 CHAPTER LXI. 
 
 THE JEWISH TRIAL. 
 
 "PASSING through the closed porch, or archway, into the inner court, 
 -■- His captors led Jesus to one of the chambers opening from it, where 
 His judges sat, ready to go through the mockery of a trial. The Roman 
 soldiers had been halted outside, for their presence would have been a 
 defilement ; but the Jewish serving men went in with the prisoner, though 
 only the few required accompanied Him to the inner chaml^er. The ti'ibunal 
 about to condemn Him, it must not be forgotten, was not a legal " court," 
 but simply a self-constitiited " Committee of Public Safety," extemporized 
 by the excited Temple authorities and Rabbis, like the Yigilance Com- 
 mittees of America, with a Jewish Fouquier Tinville for President, in the 
 person of the Sadducee Caiaphas. Knowing the illegality of their pro- 
 ceedings, they could only venture to propose the framing an indictment 
 to lay before Pilate, and trust to their violence for extorting a condem- 
 nation from him. 
 
 The hierarchy were masters of form, and knew how to honour the appear- 
 ance of justice while mocking the reality. In imitation of the traditional 
 usages of the Sanhedrim, while it existed, the judges before whom Jesus 
 was led, sat turbaned, on cushions or pillows, in Oriental fashion, with 
 crossed legs and unshod feet, in a half circle ; Caiaphas, as high priest, in 
 the centre, and the chief or oldest, according to precedence, on each side. 
 The prisoner was placed, standing, before Caiaphas ; at each end of the 
 semicircle sat a scribe, to write out the sentence of acquittal or condem- 
 nation; some bailiffs, with cords and thongs, guarded the Accused, while 
 a few others stood behind, to call witnesses, and, at the close, to carry out 
 the decision of the judges. 
 
 Like most other matters in the Judaism of the time, nothing could be 
 fairer, or more attractive, on paper, but on paper alone, than the rules for
 
 G80 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 the trial o£ prisoners. The accused was iu all cases to be held innocent 
 till proved guilty. It was an axiom, that " the Sanhedrim was to save, not 
 to destroy life." No one could be tried and condemned in his absence, and 
 when a person accused was brought before the court, it was the duty of 
 the president, at the outset, to admouisli the witnesses to remember the 
 value of human life, and to take care that tliey forgot nothing that would 
 tell in the prisoner's favour. Nor was he left undefended ; a Baal-Ilil:), or 
 counsel, was appointed, to see that all possible was done for liis acquittal. 
 Whatever evidence tended to aid him was to be freely admitted, and no 
 member of the court who had once spoken in favour of acquittal could 
 afterwards vote for condemnation. Tlie votes of the youngest of the 
 judges were taken first, that they might not be influenced by their seniors. 
 In capital charges, it required a majority of at least two to condemn, and 
 while the verdict of acquittal could be given at once, that of guilty could 
 only be pronounced the nest day. Hence, capital trials could not begin 
 on the day preceding a Sabbath, or public feast. No criminal trial could 
 be carried through in the night; the judges who condemned any one to 
 death had to fast all the day before, and no one could be executed on the 
 same day on which the sentence was pronounced. 
 
 Rules so precise and so humane condemn the whole trial of Jesus, before 
 Caiajahas, as an outrage. It was, in fact, an anticipation of the jirostitu- 
 tiou of justice which Josephus records as common in the later days of 
 Jerusalem. "Fictitious tribunals and judicatures," he tells us, "were 
 set up, and men called together to act as judges though they had no real 
 authority, when it was desired to secure the death of an ojiponent." As 
 in those later instances, so now in the case of Jesus, they kept up the form 
 and mockery of a tribunal to the close. No accuser presenting himself, 
 the judge himself took the office, in utter violation of all propriety. Wit- 
 nesses against the prisoner alone appeared, and were eagerly brought 
 forward by the judge ; but not a single witness in His defence was called, 
 though the law gave s.ich the preference. No Baal-Rib, or counsel, was 
 assigned Him, nor were any facilities provided, or even the possibility 
 offered, for His calling witnesses in His favour. The " court," from the 
 first, sought to condemn; not as the law required, to acquit. There was 
 no attempt, as was usual, to ascertain the trustworthiness of the hostile 
 evidence, nor any warning, beforehand, to those who gave it, of the moral 
 and legal offence of untruthfulness. So keenly, indeed, has the judicial 
 murder of Jesus been felt by the Jewish nation, in later times, that the 
 doctrine was afterwards invented in the Talmud, that any one who gave 
 himself out as a false Messiah, or who led the people astray from the 
 doctrines of their fathers, could be tried and condemned the same day, or 
 in the night. Yet, in contradiction to this, the monstrous fable was also 
 coined, that a crier called aloud, for forty days, before Christ's condemna- 
 tion, for witnesses in His favour to come forward. 
 
 If we try to discover by what law it was possible to condemn Jesus 
 legally, it will be found that, provided He could not be proved guilty of 
 some civil crime, there were no written laws whatever to which Caiaphas 
 and his assessors could appeal against Him. The Old Testament had not
 
 THE JEWISH TKIAL. 681 
 
 anticipated the case of any one calling himself the Messiah, whether in a 
 national or spiritual sense, and the charges so often made against Him, 
 of having broken the laws of the Sabbath, even if He could not have de- 
 fended Himself against them, were not punishable, by the laws of the day 
 Avitli death. The grounds on which the theocracy could press for a capital 
 conviction lay wholly outside the law of Moses, and even of those expan- 
 sions and modifications of it which formed the current law. A pretext 
 had to be invented for the course taken. His real offence was that the 
 Church authorities felt He was diffusing a spiritual influence, which 
 if left to develop and spread, would inevitably imdermine the corrupt theo- 
 cracy, and with it, their own power and woi-ldly interests. To gain a brief 
 respite, they were bent on putting Him to death, thongh His lofty purity 
 of life and morals far transcended the highest ideals hitherto known, and 
 His Divine goodness was altogether unique. They did not see that, to 
 kill Him, was only to hasten the ruin of the cause they sought to uphold. 
 
 But His spiritual glory remained hidden to their wilful blindness, and 
 the shadow into which it threw their own shortcomings roused only fana- 
 tical rage. Since, therefore, they could bring no capital charge recognised 
 in the Law, against Him, there remained nothing except to feign horror, 
 as Jews, at the presumption of one so much below them in w^orldly station, 
 raising Himself above the divinely revealed laws of Moses, and even claim- 
 ing equality with. God ; and as hj'pocritical friends of the Eoman, whom 
 they in reality hated intensely, to pretend indignation and fear at the 
 popular disturbance and disloyalty to the Emperor, which they affected to 
 believe would result from His claim as Messiah King. Only on this last 
 ground could they secure the indispensable assistance of Eoman power, to 
 put Him to death. 
 
 Caiaphas now, at last, had his enemy face to face. He would make Him 
 feel what it was to denounce the priesthood as He had done, and to hold 
 them up to the obloquy of the nation, as careless of the charge entrusted 
 to them, by His taking it on Himself to interfere with their Temple juris- 
 diction, in His puritanical " cleansing" of the sacred enclosures. He had 
 brought lasting odium on them, by the contrast between His zeal in this 
 matter, and their alleged neglect, in allowing so-called abuses. The fana-. 
 tical reformer who would turn the world upside down, was now standing, 
 bound, before him, and he had Him at his mercy. The rest of the self- 
 constituted judges had their own injuries to avenge, for had not they, the 
 scribes and Pharisees, teachers of the nation, been denounced with as 
 unsparing contempt as the knot of high caste Sadducees ? Caiaphas had 
 long made up his mind what to do. The form of a trial might be necessary, 
 but the result was determined beforehand. He had already counselled 
 both Sadducees and Pharisees to lay aside mutual disputes, and unite 
 against Jesus, as one Avho endangered their common interests, and to 
 sacrifice Him without hesitation. Policy, He had urged, demanded that 
 He be at once put to death, to prevent His overthrowing the whole ecclesi- 
 astical constitution, with which their welfare and dignity were identified. 
 The sentence was thus proclaimed before Caiaphas took his seat that 
 night ; the judge had already openly said that he intended to condemn.
 
 G82 'J'lii'i LIKE or ciruisT. 
 
 Till' wholo procciuliiiiJtM ^\■cvv., in I'ucL, simj)!}' m, .siiidoMi hypocrisy, to socnro 
 ilic iicccRsary aid oO llio lloiuiin oxccutioncr. 
 
 |)(';i,(lly cnciiiics iiX oMut tinu-s, l-iio inoniLcra ol' iho " coiii'L " wcro now 
 on l;iu> iiio.:!, iiiniivhlo t.(>nns, in Llicir anxicLy (,o liiniL down iJio comnioii foo. 
 'J'iio proceeding's hco-fvn by (Jaiaplias, as lie glaiuunl licsrccly afc Ins prisoner, 
 askinu; varions (|ii(^sLioiis rcspocliiiif:; His discijilcs and Ills icacliin"^: 
 Wliy JIc ga,L]ioro(i so many followers P Wiiab Ho liad moaiiL hy sendint^ 
 tlicnn llii'on.ti,li (Jalileo and Jiulca, annoiincinpf the coming of ilio Kingdom 
 ol' (iodi^ Why, a i'cw dnys before, at His eniranoo to the city, He had 
 allowed tlic crowds to hail Him as tlio Messiah P What llo meant ])y tho 
 Kingdom of the -Messiah, and why 1 hi did not forinaHy and pnblicly pro- 
 claim Jiimself tho Christ P 
 
 Jesus carcfnlly avoided any allusion io His disciples in IFis answcn-, for 
 to have njforrcd i*o Mieni, might liirve brouglil. I hem inLo danger. As to 
 Himself, the questions needed no iiupiiry; the matter spoke for itself. " 1 
 liavo taught frankly and without reserve," said lie; "1 have no sei'reb 
 docitrines; 1 have spoken overyHiing T had to toacli, publiely, in the ayna- 
 gogucs and schools of the hind, before fricinds ;ui(l (^lemioa, and lioro in 
 .birusahnn, in tho 'remplc, whei-e 1. had i'or hearers tho peo])le assenibl(>d 
 fi-oin all parts. I have taught nothing sccvctly— nothing cxeei)t in these 
 ])nblie places. Why do you ask mo P ask some of the multitudes who have 
 lieiird me. 'i'liey know what I have siiid to them, and what they say will 
 seem to you more impartial th;ni :i.ny words of mine. 'J'h(! Tjaw rcMpiircs 
 that wilnesses should lirst b(! exainined in any trial." 
 
 ]}nt an lionesl. and formaJ inipiii'y of I his kind, tliongh n(!cessavy by the 
 Law, was no part of the plan of Oaiaphas and his assessors. They sought 
 oidy to get Jesus handed over to tho Romans as soon as possil)l(>, that Jle 
 might be lie^'ond the hopeof resoiio when i\\r, ]ieople, among Avhoin lie had 
 so many supporters, awoke in the morning, 'i'hat llo should dare; Io dii'cet 
 tho high [iriest as to his duty, and should presume to throw on tho court 
 tho rightfid task of proving ilis guilt, was a fi-csh oR'ence, and provoked 
 fierce looks and angry words fi'ouT tho bench. Tiie def(ince was at oneo 
 rudely inlcri'iipted, For onc! of tho attendants standing by— Avhelher of his 
 own accord, because ho saw tho feeling of tho judges, or at a, hint from 
 ] bmnas or Caiaphas — in utter violation of judicial rules or connnon decency, 
 forthwith struck tho prisoner on tho mouth, with his hand, to silence Him. 
 "Auswerest thou tho high i)rit;st thus boldly P" said he. Nothing could 
 have ])lcased the bench better, and tlu^y ditl not attemjjb to rebuko tho 
 olTender. It fa^ihul, liowever, to disturb the calm self-possession and 
 dignity of .Tosus. "If I have ppokcn what is false," Ho replied, " ]irovo 
 that I hav(! (lone so, bnl- if wliiit I say bo right-, why do yon sli'ik<' mo 
 violently thus P No one has a right to take the lii,w in his own h;inds, 
 much less ii sei'vant of the court." 
 
 The iippeal Io th(! known and cslablished forms of trinl had not hmn 
 lost. Ifostile wil iii'S!-<es had already been sought to bring homo to JosUH, 
 if possible, some ciiiu'ge of l'als(! doctrine or seditions language, but nono 
 had l)oen found. The oidy cnichMice to b(! h;ul would not sullice, even in 
 tnieli ail assemhly, to est aJilish a capi t a.l eharj^-eof which the liomaus would
 
 THE JfiWISII TRIAL. 683 
 
 lako cogiiiziiiicc. There wcvo inaiiy, doubtlosH, wlio liiul lioard liim uso 
 liuifTiiago ■which had givoii llio llaljbi.s olTcncc — such as, "Thy hIwh ara 
 i'oi'f^ivcu tlicc;" •words regarded as blasphemy, and, therefore, piiiiiKhablo 
 with death, liy Jewish hiw ; but they Avanted to condemn llim on a cliargo 
 recognised by lioman huv. They liatl tried Ijy spies, for montiis Ijack, to 
 draw from Him something they couhl twist into an attack on the jiational 
 rebgion, or the Roman government, Inil; iiad lulled. Tt Avas liiird to git a 
 tolerable i)retext for condemning IJim. 
 
 Such evidence as they had was now, Iiowevcr, brought forward, in I In; 
 hope that it would at least prove Ilim to be "a deceiver of the people," 
 stirring them up, and exciting them against the laws of Moses, as delined 
 by tlie iiabbis. But it was a fundamental rule of Jewish jurisprudentjc, 
 that condemnation could only follow the concuri'cnt testimony of, at least, 
 two witnesses. Some, however, who came forward, had notiiing relevant 
 to say, aiul others conti'adie^ted themselves. Ilis last discoui'ses were, 
 doubtless, the special crime in the eyes of Ilis accusers. Little could 1)C 
 said about Ilis ovation on entering Jerusalem, except that lie had not 
 refused it, nor was oven the expulsion of the buyers and sellers from the 
 Temple brouglit up, for the spirit that dictated it was evidently noble, 
 however the acit itself might bo challenged. The strong invectives against 
 the collcctivo hierarchy oltered a safer ground for accusation. Unfortu- 
 nately for tlio judges, suitable witnesses were not to bo found. At tho 
 best, those who came forward garbled, or misunderstood His words, as 
 the hierarchy themselves afterwards, bel'oi'o I'ilato, twisted those I'espeet- 
 ing tho tribute money into a directly opposite sense. Ibit even thus, tho 
 testimony amounted to nothing. Time was jiasHiiig da)igerously fast, 
 without anything done. 
 
 At last one witness appeared, who .alleged that ho had ]i('ar<] Jesus say, 
 " i'uU down this Temple, it is only the Avork of man, iuid I will !ii Ihi-eo 
 days build another, not made with hands." Others agi'eed that He Jiad 
 said words which seemed intended to bring the Tenqde into contempt; an 
 offence so grave that it was afterwards made a caj)ital charge against tho 
 first martyr, Stei)hen, that he liad" spoken blasphemous words against 
 this holy place; " but their statements did not tally, and their wilne;;s was 
 therefore worthless. 
 
 Meanwhile, Jesus had stood silent. Even to charges so hateful to Jewi.sh 
 cars as contempt of the Temple, lie liad made no answer, IIo know it 
 would bo idle to speak before such a ti'ibunal, a?id ke]it a dignified silence, 
 n^o tho judges, on tho other hand, they seemed of tho greatest weight, 
 Caiaphas, a true inquisitor, could no longer prescrvo ofFicial calmness. 
 Spi'ingiug from his couch, and standing up in front of it, he demanded if 
 Je.sus Iiad nothing to say in Ilis own defence against all this. What did 
 I lis silence mean ? Was it a confession of guiltP IJnt He still remained 
 silent. Tho matter spoke for itself; tins testimony given against llitn Avas 
 discordant and worthless. If His ])ast life could not secure His actjuittal, 
 mere words were vain. To use His own earli(,'r saying, they would bo 
 ])ear]s cast before swine, who would turn again and rend Him. Self-con- 
 scious and kingly. He demeaned Himself with a lofty composure \,\\\iv
 
 084 TUB LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 impressed even His judges. He would let violence and falsehood run 
 their course. He would not recognise the tribunal, nor do honour to its 
 members, for He knew that they were determined that He should die, 
 innocent or guilty, to serve their own ends. 
 
 Caiaphas might have closed the examination at this ])oint, and have 
 taken the votes of the Commission. But with quick, hypocritical aeutc- 
 ness, he felt that the charge best sustained was an offence only in Jewish 
 eyes ; that the evidence in support of it was open to criticism, and that 
 the silence of the prisoner might not, after all, be an admission of guilt. 
 His pride, moreover, was touched by such an attitude towards himself the 
 primate, and he would force an answer, if possible, to save his own dignity. 
 It would, besides, be better to go no further into matters which might 
 protract the sitting, and spoil the plot, by letting morning return before 
 Jesus was in the safe hands of the Komans. True to the serpent-cunning 
 of the house of Hannas, he determined to bring things to a head by 
 making Him, if possible, compromise Himself at once with Jewish opinion 
 and Roman fears. He hoped to worm out what could be distorted into a 
 civil offence; for His keen knowledge of men told him, that, while fitly 
 silent and dignified hitherto, his prisoner would give a frank reply, and 
 reveal His secret thoughts when honour demanded it. He was evidently 
 about to die, as He had been charged with living, an enthusiast and zealot. 
 
 Looking straight at the accused, the mitred hypocrite, in his white robes, 
 with practised official solemnity, went straight to the heart of the matter, 
 by the demand, uttered in Aramaic, the common speech of the Jewish 
 courts as of the nation, " I put you on your oath by the living God, whose 
 curse falls on those Avho swear falsely by Him, and require you to tell us 
 whether you arc the Malcha Meschicha — the King Messiah — the Son of 
 God— Ever Blessed ? " 
 
 The long foreseen moment had come, when an open claim, which He had 
 hitherto left to be inferred from His acts and figurative expressions, rather 
 than openly stated, would bring on Him swift sentence of death. Caiaphas 
 knew that many believed Him to be the Messiah ; that He Himself had 
 not refused the awful name, but had, rather, in His discourses, justified its 
 being given Him ; and that a few days before. He had allowed the tliou- 
 sands of Galiltean pilgrims, who greeted His entrance to Jerusalem, to 
 salute Him by it. But the ecclesiastical authorities had decided that He 
 neither was, nor could be, the Messiah, and, hence, in their eyes, His 
 claiming openly to be so would be a crimen lessee majestatls — blasphemous 
 high treason against the true Sovereign of the Land, Jehovah. He had 
 hitherto evaded a direct answer, except in rare cases, because the time had 
 not yet come for His openly declaring Himself. To have done so before 
 all hope of longer life was passed, would have cut short His public work 
 in founding His Kingdom. 
 
 But the supreme moment had now arrived. With kingly dignity, in the 
 face of certain death for His Avords, and in solemn answer to the appeal 
 to " the living God " as to their truth, Jesus calmly replied to the adjura- 
 tion: " If I tell you, ye will not believe, and if I ask questions that would 
 prove my highest claims you would not answer. Thoii hast said the Truth
 
 THE JEWISH TRIAL. 685 
 
 — I AM the Malcha Mescliiclia — the King Messiah — the Sou of God aud 
 Son of man. In my present guise ye will see me no more ; but when ye 
 have slain me, I, the Son of man, will forthwith sit on the right hand of 
 the Majesty of God, and when ye see me next it will be sitting there, and 
 coming in the clouds of heaven." 
 
 This declaration might have seemed sutficiently explicit, but the excite- 
 ment of the judges, true Orientals, liad grown ungovernable. Kising ou 
 their cushions, one and all demanded, with loud voices, " Art Thou, then, 
 the Son of God ? " " You have said it," replied Jesus, " axd I am." 
 
 They had gained their end. Hearing witnesses would have required 
 time, and their whole scheme would have miscarried, if Jerusalem woke 
 and the Galilrean pilgrims learned, while a rescue was still possible, the 
 secret arrest through the night, of their fellow-countryman, whom many 
 of them esteemed a prophet of Jehovah, if not the very Messiah. 
 
 Caiaphas played his part well. Quivering with passion, and triumphant 
 at his success, he forgot the pi'actised coldness of the Sadducee, aud once 
 more springing from his couch with well-feigned horror at the words of 
 Jesus, though they were precisely what he had wished, rent the bosom Of 
 his priestly robe of fine linen, as if it were too narrow to let him breathe 
 after hearing such blasphemy. He forgot that it was the worst of blas- 
 phemy for his own lips to use the name of Jehovah as a mere cloak for 
 crime aud Avickedness ! Jesus had spoken with the calmness of truth and 
 innocence. He had applied to Himself words of Daniel and of the Psalms, 
 univei'sally understood of the Messiah, and had predicted His sitting 
 henceforth with Jehovah on the throne of heaven, and descending in 
 Divine majesty to judge the earth, though, while he spoke. He was at the 
 very threshold of a shameful death. 
 
 " He has blasphemed ! " cried Caiaphas. " "Wliat need is there to hear 
 more witnesses ? You have heard the blasphemy from His own lips. He 
 gives Himself out as the true Messianic Son of God, which we have 
 already decided He is not. What seems good to you, m.y colleagues ? " 
 
 In an irregular, illegal, self-constituted court, whose members had 
 already approved the cold-blooded counsel of Caiaphas, to put the prisoner 
 to death, guilty or innocent, and thus quench the fire He had kindled, in 
 His own blood, no evidence or want of it could have secured an acquittal. 
 Too many private and class grudges, and too many vested rights, lent 
 weight to any pretext for a judicial murder. The very humility aud the 
 purely spiritual aims of Jesus were, themselves, a deadly offence ; for their 
 Jewish pride flattered itself that the Messiah would wield supernatural 
 powers to restore the old Theocracy, and make Israel the head of the nations 
 instead of hated Home. Then, was He not a Galilasan— one of a race they 
 despised ? It might be true that He wrought miracles, but one who wilfully 
 broke the Law, as He openly did, by Sabbath healing— and ivlw knew what 
 else ?— must work them by help from Beelzebub, not Jehovah. 
 
 And, besides, had not the high priest told them that it was no great 
 harm if a single man were saci-ificed for the common good, even if he were 
 innocent? When, moreover, did ferocious bigotry fail to identify its cry 
 for blood with pious zeal for the glory of God ?
 
 68G THE LIFE or CHRIST. 
 
 All voted tliab farther investigation was useless ; that on His own con- 
 fession Jesus was worthy of death. 
 
 They had, at last, their wish. All charges affecting the Temple, or 
 Judaism, would have raised only the contemptuous laugh of the lloman 
 Procurator. But now that Jesus had claimed to be the Messiah, lie could 
 be represented to Pilate as a State criminal, delivered up for an attempt 
 against the imperial rights of Tiberius. 
 
 The formal, preliminary examination was over, but its result needed to 
 be confirmed by a larger gathering of the hierarchy. It was about three 
 o'clock in the morning, and some hours must elapse before the sentence 
 could be formally ratified. 
 
 Meanwhile, Jesus was left in charge of the rough Temple police, while 
 the judges separated for an hour or two of sleep. There was nothing, now, 
 to restrain the coarse natui-es to whom the condemned prisoner had been 
 consigned. One under sentence of death was always, in these rough ages, 
 the sport and mockery of his guards, and those in charge of Jesus, made 
 worse than common by the example of the judges, vented their cruelty on 
 Him with the fiercest brutality. Their passions, indeed, intensified their 
 bitterness, for they were fierce Jewish bigots. He was to die as a false 
 prophet, and as such they treated Him, racking their ingenuity to invent 
 insult and injury. Having blindfolded Him, some struck Him violently 
 on the head with their fists, or perhaps with the vine-stick which Eoman 
 centurions and other officials carried as their sign of rank, and were wont 
 to use on the face or head of the soldiers— for some of the captors of Jesus 
 had such staves with them — others struck Him with their open hands, 
 while still others, adding the greatest indignity an Oriental could offer, 
 spat in His face; crying, as they insulted and tortm^cd Him, "Prophecy 
 to us. Thou Messiah, who was it that did it ? " The hands they had bound 
 had healed the sick and raised the dead ; the lips they smote had calmed 
 the winds and the waves. One word, and the splendours of the Mount of 
 Transfiguration would have filled the chamber ; one word, and the menials 
 now sporting with Him at their will would have perished. But, as He 
 had begun and continued. He would end — as self -restrained in the use of 
 His awful powers on His own behalf as if He had been the most helpless 
 of men. Divine patience and infinite love knew no wearying. He had 
 but to will it and He would walk free, but He came to die for man, and 
 He would not shrink from doing so. 
 
 While His examination had been proceeding, the central court, which 
 seems to have been paved, was the waiting place of the servants of the 
 several judges, and of the underlings of the high priest, and the Temple 
 watch. John and Peter, recovering from their first panic, and anxious to 
 see what became of their Master, had followed at a distance, till He was 
 brought to the house of Caiaphas. The door of the outer court, or porch, 
 had been closed, to prevent the entrance of any one likely to spread an 
 alarm and bring about a rescue ; but John, happening to be known to the 
 household, or, perhaps, to the high priest himself, was readily admitted. 
 Meanwhile, Peter remained shut out, but at John's solicitation was 
 presently admitted by the maid v/ho kept the door.
 
 THE JEWISH TKIAL. 687 
 
 A fire of wood kiudled in the open court in tlie chilly April night, had 
 attracted all round it, Peter among the rest, by its cheerful blaze. He sat 
 by the light with weary heart, woiidering what the end woiLld be, and not 
 without alarm for his own safety, in case he should be recognised, and 
 charged with his violence in the garden. Meanwhile, the door-keeper, 
 who, perhaps, had seen him in attendance on Jesus in the Women's Court 
 of the Temple, sauntered like others, to the fire, and with a woman's 
 aljruptncss, after gazing at him steadily, put the question directly to him : 
 " Art thou, also, one of this man's disciples ? " Confused and oflE his 
 guard, he said nothing ; but she would not let him go. " Thou, also, wasfc 
 with Jesus of Galilee," she continued — repeating to those round her, 
 '■' Certainly this man, also, was with Him." " Woman," said Peter, stam- 
 mering out the words in mortal terror for his life, " I do not know Him ; 
 I do not know what you mean." But his conscience was ill at ease, and 
 his fears grew apace. He could no longer hide his confusion, and went 
 off into the darkness of the porch. His inexorable inquisitor would not, 
 however, let him escape. He had hardly come to the light again, after a 
 time, when she once more scanned him, and, determined to justify herself, 
 began to speak of him to the serving men and slaves. " He is one of them. 
 He ivas with Jesus of ISTazareth." Irritated and alarmed, and losing all 
 presence of mind, he repeated his denial with an oath. "I do not know 
 the man. I am not one of His disciples. I swear I am not." 
 
 His stout assertions gave him an hour's respite and peace, but his 
 troubles were not over, for the maid had called attention to him, and his 
 bearing had excited suspicion. At last, one of the slaves of the high 
 priest, a kinsman of the wounded Malchus, renewed the subject by asking 
 Peter directly, " Did I not see thee, as I was standing at the door of the 
 garden, just as they were coming out?" "You never did," said Peter. 
 " I was not there." " Why, your very speech shows that you are of them 
 — you ivere with Him," cried angry, fierce voices, " you are a Galilasan— 
 we hear it in your words." 
 
 Peter now lost all control of himself. He had tried to strengthen his 
 last denial by a solemn oath, but now burst into curses and imprecations 
 on himself, if he had not spoken truth, in saying that he knew nothing 
 whatever about Jesus ! In the midst of his excitement a cock-crow fell 
 on his ears, and, at the sound, his Master, still before His murderers in 
 the room opening into the courtyard, tarned and looked him full in the 
 face, with those loving, but now reproachful, eyes, in the light of which 
 Peter had so long found his sweetest joy. 
 
 It was enough. The glance, like lightning revealing an abyss, brought 
 back to its nobler self the honest heart that for a time had been alarmed 
 into superficial nnfaithfuhiess, and threw an awful brightness into the 
 depths of sin on whose edge he stood. All his unmanly weakness and 
 wretched fear rose in his thoughts, and, with them, the remembrance of 
 his boastings, so miserably belied. Christ's words, which he had so 
 warmly repudiated— that, before the cock crew, he would deny Him 
 thrice— had come true. What a contrast between the grand strength of 
 his Master, and his own weakness !
 
 688 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 yiuirae and aorrow, mingled on the moment with a yearning hope of 
 forgiveness, overpowered him, and he did now, what he shoukl have done 
 earlier, went out, and wept bitterly. It is a touching, and beautiful 
 tradition, true to the sincerity of his repentance, if not as a historical 
 reality, that, all his life long, the rememln-ance of this night never lefb 
 him, and that, morning by morning, he rose at the hour when the look of 
 his Master had entered liis soul, to pray once more for pardon. 
 
 Towards the close of the fourth watch, and before da3'l)reak, the heads 
 of the theocracy, true to precedent, which required that the whole Sanhe- 
 drim, while it existed, should meet to ratify a sentence of death, had 
 extemporized a semblance of the old High Court of the Xation, in some 
 suitable building. Thither Jesus was now led, under escort of Temple 
 police and retainers of the high priest, to appear before the notables of 
 Israel. The chiefs of the priestly courses, and other dignitaries of the 
 Temple, with a number of elders and Eabbis, had gathered in the fading 
 darkness, old though most of them were, to take part in the condemnation 
 of the Hated One. The proceedings were, hoAvever, only formal — to hear 
 the sentence of the Commission and to endorse it. This done, the way 
 was clear for handing Him over to Pilate. 
 
 In tlie eyes of those who thus unanimously confirmed the fatal sentence, 
 He was a criminal of the worst dye ; for, in their opinion. He had blas- 
 phemed with audacious boldness, by claiming to be the King Messiah, the 
 Son of God, the long-expected Deliverer of the nation, sent to it from 
 heaven. ISTo one had ever before laid claim to the sacred name; for, 
 though many Messiahs rose in later years, no one, as yet, had assumed the 
 tremendous dignity. Proof more than enough to establish His highest 
 claims, offered itself in His life and words and works ; Imt passion and 
 prejudice had hardened their hearts and blinded their judgments. The 
 worst among them would never have dared to proceed against Him, had 
 they believed Him really the Messiah. " I know," says St. Peter, " that 
 you acted in ignorance, as did also j'our rulers." But it was the ignorance 
 that had refused the light. Had they been honest and honourable, the 
 first point to have been settled would have been, at least to hear what the 
 Accused had to say in His own favour. They had constituted themselves 
 the vindicators of the Law and the Prophets, and it was their elementary 
 duty to hear the prisoner's exposition of the statements of both, respecting 
 the matter in hand. He had owned Himself the Messiah, and for doing 
 so, without giving Him the opportunity of supporting His claim, they voted 
 the sentence of death by noisy acclamation. Law and tradition demanded 
 a second full hearing of the case, but they thrust both aside in their zeal 
 to get Him condemned. 
 
 CHAPTER LXIL 
 
 BEFORE PILATE. 
 
 r I IHE decision of the Jewish authorities having been duly signed and 
 -^ sealed^, and Jesus once more securely bound, He was led off, strongly 
 guarded from rescue, to the official residence of Pilate, on Mount Zion. It
 
 BEFORE PILATE. G89 
 
 was still early, but Eastern life anticij)ates tlic day, for the heat of uooii 
 requires rest during the liours busiest Avith us. The way ran from the 
 West Hall of the Temple over the TyroiJoeon, by a Ijridge, and across the 
 open space of the Xystus, with its pillared porches. The palace of Herod, 
 now Pilate's head-quarters, lay just beyond— the proud residence of the 
 Roman knight who held the government for the Emperor Tiberius. It 
 was inhabited for only a few weeks or days at a time ; but noAV, during the 
 Passover, the procurator took care to be present, to repress at once any 
 popular movement for national freedom, which the spring air, the feast 
 itself, and the vast gathering of the nation, might excite. 
 
 Now, for the first time, Jesus entered the gates of a king's palace — the 
 home of " men in soft raiment " — entered it as a prisoner. He was to | 
 stand before a man who has come down to us as one of the most nn- ■ 
 I'ighteous, cruel, arbitrary, and hateful ; a man rightly named Pilate, the 
 " Javelin-man," for it seemed his delight to launch cruelties and scoi-ns on \ 
 every side, like javelins, among the oppressed people. What had Jesus to 
 expect froiu one who hated the nation from his soul, and sported with 
 their lives and possessions as if they were not men, but a lower race of 
 despised slaves and fanatical Helots ? It might, indeed, be of benefit to 
 Him that the hatred of Pilate towards the Jews, might regard Him as a 
 Avelcome instrument, in the absence of a better, for playing olS his bitter- 
 ness against them and their leaders. To favour a Man who was in oppo- 
 sition to them, was, itself, a pleasure. Calm, terapei'ate and impartial, 
 compared to Jewish passion and bitterness, and in some respects in 
 sympathy with the accused, the hard, proud, heathen Eoman was more 
 open than the Jews or their leaders, to the impression of Christ's inno- 
 cence or harmlessness. 
 
 That he did not permanently protect Him, rose, partly, from his char- 
 acter, and, partly, from his past history as procurator. Morally enervated 
 and lawless, the petty tyrant was incapable of a strong impression or right- 
 eous firmness, and, besides, he dreaded complaints at Rome from the Jewish 
 authorities, and insurrections of the masses in his local government. He i 
 had, in the past, learned to fear the unconquerable pertinacity of the Jews ! 
 and the rebukes of the Emperor, so keenly, that he would permit, or do, 
 almost anything, for quiet. This showed itself in his course towards Jesus. 
 Protecting Him for a time, half in sympathy, half in mockery, he gave Him 
 up in the end, rather than brave the persistent demand of a people he hated 
 and feared. He would have set Him free, but for the popular clamour, and 
 a bitter remembrance of the trouble it had already given him in Jerusalem 
 and at Rome. 
 
 There was a hall in the palace, in which trials were generally conducted, 
 but the Jewish notables, who had condemned Jesus, were much too holy to I 
 enter a heathen building during the feast, since there might be old leaven 
 in it. It was Friday, and the Sabbath began that night, and in the even- 
 ing, at this season, the priests and people universally held a supplementary 
 feast on the flesh of the freewill offerings. It had, for centuries, been 
 associated with the Passover, of which it was reckoned a part, and Levitical 
 uncleanness would prevent the accusers joining in it. They were still true 
 
 Y Y
 
 690 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 to the character given them by Jesus ; careful of the outside of the bowl 
 and platter, but willing that, within, it should be filled with wickedness. 
 They had effected their end, Jesus was in the hands of the Komans before 
 Jerusalem awoke. 
 
 Knowing the people with whom he had to do, Pilate made no attempt to 
 overcome their scruples. Trials in the open air were common, for Koman 
 law courted publicity. Eoman governors, and the half Eoman Herod and 
 his sous, expected their tribunals, indifferently, before the palace, in the 
 market-place, in the theatre, in the circus, or even in the highways. Pilate, 
 therefore, caused his official seat to be set down on a spot known in Jeru- 
 salem as Gabbatha, " the high place," from its being raised above the crowd 
 and as " The Pavement," because, as was the custom with the spot on which 
 Eoman judges sat, it was laid with a mosaic of coloured stones. It was, 
 vei-y possibly, a permanent erection, square, or of crescent shape, of costly 
 marble, in keeping with the splendour so dear to Herod, its builder, and 
 seems to have been raised in front of the " Judgment Hall," a doorway 
 connecting the two. It was a maxim of Eoman law that criminal trials 
 should be held on a raised tribunal, that all might see and be seen. 
 
 The ivory curule chair of the procurator — his seat of state and sign of 
 office — or, perhaps, the old golden seat of Archelaus, was set down on the 
 tesselated floor of the tribunal, which was large enov:gh to allow the asses- 
 sors of the court — Eoman citizens — who acted as nominal members of the 
 judicial bench, to sit beside Pilate, for Eoman law required their presence. 
 On lower elevations, sat the offi^cers of the court, friends of the procurator, 
 and others whom he chose to honour. 
 
 The priests and elders who appeared against Jesus, now led Him up the 
 steps of the tribunal, to the procurator, and placed Him before him. Chairs 
 were generally set near that of the judge for the accusers, and there was 
 also, usually, a seat for the accused ; but in Judea, despised and insulted, 
 this custom v/as not now observed, at least so far as regarded Jesus, for He 
 had to stand through the trial. An interpreter was not needed, as the 
 Jewish officials doubtless spoke Greek, and Jesus, brought up in Galilee, 
 where the presence of foreigners made its use general, necessai'ily under- 
 stood it. A strong detatchment of troops from the garrison guarded the 
 tribunal and kept the ground, for a vast crowd of citizens and pilgrims 
 speedily gathered, as the news of the arrest spread. 
 
 Eoman law knew nothing of the inquisitorial system by which a prisoner 
 luight be forced to convict himself; it required that a formal accusation of 
 a specific offence should be made against him. This office of accuser, Caia- 
 phas undertook in part, as the representative of the nation and its highest 
 diguitaiy, to give the charges the greater weight, though a professional 
 "orator" may also have been employed, as was usual. 
 
 Pilate having taken his seat, began the proceedings by formally asking 
 Caiaphas and his colleagues what accusation they had against the prisoner. 
 
 " If He had not been a great offender," replied Caiaphas, as spokesman, 
 " we would not have delivered Him up to thee. We have authority, by 
 our own laws, to punish ordinary offenders ; but this man's crime goes 
 beyond our powers in the punishment it demands, and we have, therefore
 
 BEFORE PILATE. 691 
 
 handed Him over to tliee. That Ave have done so, I submit, is proof that 
 He deserves death. The presence of myself, the high priest, and of the 
 notables of the nation, as His accusers, may suffice to prove the blackness 
 of His guilt." 
 
 Pilate was not a stranger in Palestine, and Jesus had, doubtless, ali-eady 
 been under his notice, through reports of his spies and officials. He had 
 learned that He avoided all appeals to force ; that His discourses had 
 notlung ■whatever political in them, and that His zeal was mainly directed 
 against the corruptions of the Jewish priesthood and public teachers, whom 
 the Romans themselves despised for the same cause. The immense crowds 
 that had followed Him at His first appearance in Judca, three years before, 
 find His subsecpient course in Galilee, must have been the subject of many 
 official communications to Ccesarea, Pilate's usual residence ; and thej' had 
 uniformly represented Him as peaceful and harmless. Pilate knew, there- 
 fore, that He was now delivered up by the priests and. Habliis, only from 
 envy and for their own selfish ends. From all he had learned, Jesus was 
 only a well-meaning enthusiast, and he could easily see how such a man 
 mieht well be dangerous to the vested interests and mock holiness of the 
 Jewish magnates, but not at all so to Eoman authority. He was ready 
 enough to quench in blood any religious movement that threatened the 
 peace, but he saw no ground for apprehension as regarded this one. 
 
 The Gospels give only a brief outline of the whole trial, but even the 
 opening address of Caiaphas, or the orator who spoke for him and his col- 
 leagues, was, no doubt, full of rhetorical compliments to Pilate himself and 
 of fierce words against the prisoner. It had, however, a very different 
 effect on Pilate from that intended. The hypocritical clamour for blood by 
 a priesthoood whom he despised as Jews, and still more for their supersti- 
 tion, bigotry, barl^arous waui of taste and culture, restless greed, and 
 restive opposition to Eome, was hateful and repulsive. He would not involve 
 " his court, which represented the majesty of the Emperor, in any further 
 details of a question about one who seemed a mere religious reformer. The 
 accusers had, themselves, jurisdiction in their own religious disputes. 
 
 Interrupting the speaker, therefore, Pilate told him, " If you have found 
 Him what you say, you had better, in my opinion, take Him and judge 
 Him according to your own law." If they did not trouble him further, he 
 would not interfere with them. He had not, as yet, understood that they 
 sought to have Jesus put to death, but fancied they wished some other 
 punishment. 
 
 Caiaphas had his answer ready. " It is a criminal charge," said he, "a 
 charge of capital crime, and we cannot put any one to death without your 
 confirming our sentence." He could not, however, do so in any case, with- 
 out at least a summary investigation, and thus the matter nmst proceed 
 before him. They might have stoned Jesus for blasphemy, had he sanc- 
 tioned their doing so, but they were resolved to leave the odium of the 
 murder on him, and have their victim crucified. In the fulfilment of the 
 Divine counsels. He was to die, not as a martyr to Jewish fury, but as a 
 sin-offering on the Cross. 
 
 "What is your accusation then ? " asked Pilate.
 
 692 THE LIFE or GHIIIST. 
 
 Craftily keeping out of sight Christ's declaration that He was the Son 
 of God, because such a theological question was indifferent to the lloman, 
 and because heathenism had no such ideas connected with the phrase as 
 Judaism, Caiaphas turned the religious offence into a ]iolitical one. The 
 " Son of God," in a Jewish sense, was eqviivalent to the Messiah, the 
 expected national deliverer, and, hence, he created a pretension to earthly 
 royalty out of the claim. Such an accusation could not be overlooked, and 
 must wake prejudice, if believed, as involving a charge of treason against 
 the suspicious and relentless Tiberius. The priests expected an instant 
 condemnation, for they knew Pilate's hya;na-like nature. 
 
 Eoman law permitted the questioning of a prisoner after formal accusa- 
 tion, and confession of the charge was held sufficient proof of guilt. 
 
 " The accused has been condemned by us as a deceiver of the people," 
 answered the high priest. 
 
 " How ? " asked Pilate. 
 
 " In a double way," said Caiaphas. " He stirs up the nation against pay- 
 ing their tribute to Ca3sar, and He sets Himself up as King of the Jews. 
 He says He is the Messiah, which is the name we give our king, and He 
 has led many to regard Him as a descendant of David, and our only lawful 
 
 sovereign." 
 
 Jesus was standing at Pilate's side. Eising from his chair, and order- 
 ing Him to be brought after him, he retired into the palace, and calling 
 Jesus before him, asked Him, " Art Thoit the King of the Jews ? Dost 
 Thou, really, claim to be so ? " He evidently expected a disavowal, for he 
 felt it almost beneath him to put such a question to one, in his eyes, so 
 utterly unlike a king. Had he been firm and strong-minded, he would 
 have seen the groundlessness of the charge, from the absence of all overt 
 proof ; but he weakly proceeded to compromise himself, by putting Jesus 
 to examination. 
 
 Knowing that Pilate had nothing against Him but the words of His ' 
 enemies outside, Jesus, with a calm dignity that must have amazed the 
 procurator, replied by a counter question. " Do you ask this of your own 
 accord, or have others told it you of me ? " He would have Pilate remember 
 the more than doubtful source of the accusation, and that, with all his 
 official means of information, no grounds of such a charge had ever sug- 
 gested themselves to his own mind. It was, besides, essential to know if 
 he spoke as a Koman, with a political use of the title " king," or repeated 
 it in the Jewish sense, as equivalent to " the Messiah." 
 
 " Do you think I am a Jeiu ? " answered Pilate, scornfully, feeling his 
 false position in entertaining an accusation from so suspicious a source. 
 " Your own nation have brought you before me ; the charge comes from 
 the priests and Eabbis. I have only repeated what they allege. Do 
 you suppose I care for your dreams about a Messiah ? Tell me, what 
 have you done ? Do you call yourself the King of the Jews ? " 
 
 " In your sense of the word I am not a king," answered Jesus ; " but in 
 another, I am. My accusers expect a mere earthly, world-conquering 
 Messiah. But my Kingdom is not of this world — not earthly and political. 
 If it were, my attendants would have fought for me, to prevent my being
 
 BEFOEE PILATE. 693 
 
 arrested and delivered up to my enemies by the soldiers you sent against 
 me. But tliey made no resistance nor any attempt even to rescue me, and 
 this, of itself, is enough to show that my Kingdom is not a political one." 
 
 " You speak o£ a kingdom ; are you really a king, then, in any other sense 
 than the common ? " asked the procurator, awed before the Mysterious Man. 
 
 "Thou sayest it ; so it is ; I a:*x a Kixg," answered Jesus. " I was born 
 to be a king ; I camp into the world that I should bear witness for Tlie 
 Truth." He spoke il His lofty, mystic way of the Divine Truth He had 
 seen and heard in a former existence, when in the bosom of the Father. 
 " All who love and seek the Truth," he continued — " that is, who hear and 
 obey my words — are my subjects." He had thrice claimed a Kingdom, 
 and thrice told Pilate that it was not of this world. 
 
 " How these Jews talk ! " thought Pilate. " They, barbarous as they 
 are, think they have Truth as their special possession— Tkl'tii, which is a 
 riddle insoluble to our philosophers ! Wliat have I to do with such specu- 
 lations, fit only to confuse the head of a hungry Greek or a beggarly 
 Kabbi?" But he had heard enough to convince him that Jesus had no 
 thought of treason against Eome, or of stirring up a disturbance in the 
 country. Hardened, cold, worldly, he felt how awful goodness is, and 
 would fain have dismissed One so strangely different from other men — an 
 enthusiast, willing to die to make men better ! " What kind of a man is He ? " 
 thought the Roman. " If He only had not been so ready with His talk 
 about being a king ! But He will do nothing to help Himself ! AVhat is 
 Truth?" said he, ironically, and turned away without waiting an answer, 
 for in Pilate's opinion, as in that of most men of his class in that age, 
 Truth was an airy nothing, a mere empty name. 
 
 Leaving Jesus to be brought out again after him to the tribunal, he 
 returned to the accusers and the multitude. Touched Ijy the prisoner's 
 self-possession and dignity, half-afraid of One who spoke only of Truth 
 and of other worlds than this, and incensed that the hierarchy, for their 
 own ends, should have sought to palm off on him a harmless enthusiast, 
 as a dangerous traitor, he threw the priests and Eabbis into fierce con- 
 fusion, by frankly telling them " that he had examined Jesus, and found 
 no ground for any punishment in His thinking Himself the' Messiah, as 
 they called it." One point in the accusation had failed, but it was neces- 
 sary to hear what might be alleged besides. The accusers could easily 
 see that, in spite of the admission of Jesus that He claimed to be a king, 
 Pilate regarded Him rather with pity than fear. More must be done to 
 fix on Him the crime of being dangerous to the State. The priests and 
 Eabbis were greatly excited. One after another, they sprang up, with 
 charge upon charge, to confirm their main accusation. In their fierce 
 bigotry and unmeasured hatred, they had not scrupled to speak of a purely 
 relio-ious movement as a dark political plot, and now they were bold enough 
 even to adduce proofs of this treason. " He has perverted women and 
 children, and has systematically stirred up the whole nation against Ca3sar ; 
 from Galilee to Jerusalem thei-e is not a town or village in the land where 
 He has not won over some, and filled them with wild expectations. He 
 has appealed to the nation to join His Kingdom ; He has spoken against
 
 694 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 paying the taxes ; Ho is a second Judas tlie Gaulonitc, and you know what 
 hia career cost Rome, in blood and treasure." The hypocrites ! They wero 
 hunting Jesus to death simply because He would not identify Himself 
 with them, and use His supernatural jiower to drive out the Romans, and 
 set themselves on the vacant throne. They were demanding His death on 
 the pretext that He had threatened to use force to establish His Kingdom, 
 when the truth was, His real oSence, in their eyes, was that He would not 
 use force ! 
 
 Such a storm of accusations and sixspicions might well have led Pilate 
 to expect some denial or disproofs from Jesus. He doubtless attributed 
 all the difficulty of the situation to His too ready admission of His dreamy 
 kingship ; and, on every ground, even for his own sake, to clear him from 
 a business that grew more and more serious, hoped to hear some defence. 
 But Christ knew with whom He had to do. He knew His enemies were 
 determined that He should die, and would invent charge after charge till 
 He was destroyed. They had already scrupled at nothing. He knew 
 Pilate — fierce, and yet cowardly, with no moral force ; the tyrant, and yet 
 the sport of the Jewish authorities. The majesty of truth and goodness 
 in Him looked down with a pitying disdain on the moral worthlessness of 
 judge and accusers alike, and would not stoop to utter even a word in His 
 own behalf before them. 'J'hey knew His life and work, and if the witness 
 they bore were of no weight, He would add no other. " If J demand that 
 He answer," thought Pilate, " perhaps He will do so. Do you not hear," 
 said he, " how many things they accuse you of ? Do you make no defence 
 at all?" But Jesus remained silent, not uttering even a word. "Avery 
 strange man," thought Pilate. He seemed to him, more than ever, a lofty 
 enthusiast, blind to His own interests and careless of life. 
 
 The word " Galilee," in the wild cries of the jjriests and Rabins, raised 
 a new hope in Pilate's mind. Antipas was now in Jerusalem at the feast. 
 If Jesus were a Galilasan, it would be a graceful courtesy to send Him to 
 be tried, as a Galilean, before His own prince, and might perhaps efface 
 the grudge Antipas had at himself, for having let loose his soldiers lately 
 on the Galila3an pilgrims in the Temple, during a disturbance, some being 
 cut down at the very altar — a sore scandal in the Jewish world. It vfould, 
 moi'eover, get him clear of a troublesome matter, and, perhaps, it might 
 even save the strange Man— so calm, so dignified, in circumstances of such 
 weakness and humiliation ; with such a look, as if He read one's soul ; with 
 such a mysterious air of greatness, even in bonds, and in the very face of 
 death by the Cross. Antipas would hardly yield to the Temple party, as 
 he himself might be forced to do, to avoid another complaint to Rome. He 
 no sooner, therePore. heard that Jesus was a Galila3an, than he ordered 
 Him to be transferred to Antipas, that he might judge Him. 
 
 The old palace of the Asmoneans, in which Antipas lodged, was not far 
 from I'llate's splendid official residence. It lay a few streets off, to the 
 nortli-east, within the same old city wall, on the slope of Zion, the levelled 
 crest of which was occupied by the vast palace of Herod, now the Roman 
 head-quarters. Both were in the old, or Upper Cit}^ and through the 
 narrow streets, the sides of which rose high above the centre to prevent
 
 BEFORE PILATE. 695 
 
 defilement to passers-by, Jesus was led under escort of a detachment o£ 
 the Eoraan troops on duty. The accusers had no choice but to follow, and 
 the multitude went off with them, for it was no ordinary spectacle to see 
 the high priest and all the great men of the city, thus in public together. 
 
 The vassal king was caught in Pilate's snare. The flattery of refeiTing 
 a Galitean case to him as the Galilfean tetrarch, greatly pleased him, and 
 his light superficial nature was no less gratified by having One brought 
 before him, of whom he had heard so much. In his petty court, amidst all 
 its affectation of grandeur and state, ennui hung like a di'owsiness overall. 
 He had never seen a miracle, and should like to be able to say he had. It 
 would break the monotony of a day, and give an hour's languid talk. A 
 prisoner, in danger of the Cross, could not refuse to humour him, if he 
 commanded Him to perform one ! He had been afraid of Jesus once, but 
 a miracle-worker in chains could be only, at best, a clever juggler. 
 
 Pilate had taken his seat on his tribunal in the grey dawn, and an hour 
 had passed. It was shortly after six, when Antipas, early astir, like all 
 Orientals, heard the commotion in the courtyard of his palace, and received 
 word that Jesus had been handed over to his authority. A few minutes 
 more, and the prisoner was led into the Court of Justice of the palace, and 
 presently Antipas made his appearance on the tribunal, on which Jesus 
 was also forthwith placed. 
 
 The light, weak, crafty, worthless man, was disposed to be very con- 
 descending. He put question after question to Him, as his idle curiosity 
 suggested, and doubtless commanded that a miracle might be performed 
 there and then. But Jesus was no conjurer or "magus." He was ready 
 to save His life by worthy means, but He would not, for a moment, stoop 
 to anything ignoble. The creature before Him clad in purple was the 
 murderer of John, the slave of a wicked woman, a mean adulterer, and 
 would fain have had His life as well as that of the Baptist. Jesus felt, 
 therefore, only utter disdain for him, and treated him with withering 
 silence. He might tire himself with questions, but not a word of reply 
 would be vouchsafed. Antipas began to feel that it was no time to indulge 
 his humour, and grew half-alarmed. 
 
 The high priests and Eabl)is, Caiaphas at their head, would gladly have 
 turned the annoyance of the tetrarch to their own account. When his 
 questions had ceased, they broke out into vehement accusations, forgetful, 
 in their rage, alike of their office and of their self-respect. But they, too, 
 were met with the same insufferable, contemptuous silence, which gave no 
 chance of fastening anything on their enemy, by any admission of His 
 own. Antipas was no less at a loss than Pilate what to do. One thing, 
 alone, he had resolved— he would take no part in condemning so mysterious 
 a man. Was he afraid of the large following Jesus already had in Galilee, 
 Was he spell-bound and awed by those eyes, that calmness, that more than 
 kingly dignity ? Was he afraid of the very power of which he had craved 
 sonie exhTbition ? When there was no Herodias at hand to make him the 
 tool of her revenge, he was rather a mere voluptuary than cruel. 
 
 Treated so strangely before his courtiers, humbled and badled, Antipas 
 covered his defeat and alarm by an affectation of contemptuous ridicule.
 
 GOG THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 'I'lie liiirmlosf!. fanatiral niiulinan, wlio claimed to be a kiiif?. would inako a 
 fine Ijutt for tlic humour of his guard. Lot them trick Iliiii out as u kiug, 
 aud ])lay at homage to Him, and see how He would hear His shadowy dig- 
 nities ! It was a hrave chance for the courtiers to show their matdiness hy 
 mocking a hel]ilcs.s ])risoner ! Antipas knew, hy this time, Pilate's opinion 
 of the accused, and suspected why he had sent Him. So, oflicer and 
 common soldier set themselves to amuse tlieir master, by trying their wit 
 on this ridiculous pretender to a crown ! Tired at last, nothing remained 
 but to send Him back to Pilate, and let him finish what he had begun. 
 Antij)as had no desire to meddle further in what might prove a very 
 troublesome matter. Having, therefore, put a white robe — the Jewish 
 roj-al colour— on Jesus, as if to show his contempt for such a king, Ho 
 sent Him back to the procurator. 
 
 Pilate had already made one vain attempt to save Him, and now, anxious 
 to end the matter, summoned the accusers once more to the tribunal. A 
 great crowd had gathered, mostly of citizens, instinctively hostile to tho 
 alleged enemy of the Temple by which they lived. Looking at Jesus again, 
 standing before him in the humble dress of the people— for they had 
 already stripped Him of His robe of mockery— Pilate noticed that ho 
 showed no trace of fanaticism in word, bearing, or countenance ; and felt 
 more convinced than ever that He was no rebel or dangerous person. " I 
 have examined this man," said he, " and nothing worthy of death has been 
 done by Him. Still more, I sent Him to Herod, and he is of the same 
 opinion, and has transferred Him again to me imcondemned. But since 
 so much trouble has been caused by His fancies, He deserves some punish- 
 ment. I shall, therefore, order Him to be scourged and then dismissed. 
 It will be a warning to Him." The proposjil was a mean salve to the 
 wounded pride of the hierarchy for liis refusing their demand for a sen- 
 tence of death. 
 
 Meanwhile a cry, destined to have momentous results, arose in the crowd. 
 It was the custom to carry out capital sentences at the Feast times, that 
 the people at large might get a lesson ; but it was also the practice of the 
 procurators, in compliment to the deliverance of Israel from the slavery of 
 Egypt, commemorated hj the Passover, to release any prisoner condemned 
 to death, whom the multitude might name in the Passover week. 
 
 Coming forward, therefore, and addressing both accusers and people, 
 Pilate reminded them of their custom that he should release a prisoner 
 to them at the Passover. Cries instantly rose, clamouring that he, as 
 hitherto, would grant them this favour, aud for once tho shouts pleased 
 him ; for he fancied that, this time, there could be no question who should 
 receive the pardon. One who claimed to be their national king, and had 
 attracted so much notice, would, he assumed, be gladly accepted. He 
 called out to the people, therefore, whether they would like " Jesus, their 
 king," to be the prisoner now released to them. 
 
 It happened that, at this time, there lay, awaiting execution, one Barab- 
 bas— the son of a Eabbi— who had, apparently, been compromised, through 
 religious fanaticism, in one of the countless petty revolts which incessantly 
 harassed the Romans. He was no common robber, but a zealot, who, in
 
 BEFORE PILATE. G97 
 
 mistaken ardour for the honour of the Law, had taken part in a tumult, 
 during which some Eoman sympathizers or soldiers had been killed. 
 
 The proposal of Pilate threatened to overthrow the scheme of the hier- 
 archy, and, unless opposed on the instant, might catch the popular fancy, 
 and be accepted. Caiaphas and his party, therefore, with quick presence 
 of mind, determined to turn attention from it, by i-aising a counter pro- 
 posal flattering to local passion. " Ask him to release Barabbas to you, 
 and not this man," shouted they to the mob. It was a dexterous stroke, 
 for Barabbas had been condemned for an offence which made him a martyr 
 in the eyes of the people. He had risen against the abhorred Eoman. He 
 was a patriot, therefore ; a zealot for the Temple and the Law, while Jesus 
 was the enemy of things as they were, opposed tradition and rites, and 
 demanded reforms. Caiaphas had no sympathy with the revolutionary 
 fierceness of Barabbas, but it was, after all, only an excess of zeal on the 
 right side, whereas Jesus was the public accuser of the whole priesthood, 
 and of the schools as well. 
 
 The cry for Barabbas, therefore, was raised by the high priest as a cue 
 to the people, and repeated with such vehement urgency that, erelong, it 
 was caught up by the whole crowd, who were presently wild with excite- 
 ment to have " the patriot " released, instead of Jesus. The public opinion 
 or voice of a nation, when the result of free expression of opposite judg- 
 ments, may be the voice of God ; but the voice of the unthinking multitude, 
 as the outburst of sudden passion or caprice, seems often that of Satan. 
 Pilate was under no legal obligation to give the people their choice, but 
 had fancied he might appeal to them as against the ])riests and Eabbis, 
 and play them off, as a counterpoise to the opposition of their leaders, and 
 a security for himself with the Emperor. But the priests kejDt up the cz-y 
 for Barabbas so fiercely, and, to Pilate's regret, the multitude echoed it 
 with such a wild tumult of voices, that he saw he had failed. " Give us 
 Barabbas," alone was heard. A popular tumult seemed rising. Every- 
 thing promised another scene like that of the great deputation to Caesarea, 
 about the standards set up in Jerusalem, when the persistent cries of the 
 multitude were not to be silenced, even by fear of death, and forced Pilate, 
 in the end, to yield. 
 
 To add to the governor's perplexity, he had scarcely ascended the judge's 
 seat to receive the decision of the people, and give his sentence in accord 
 with it, when a message came to him from his wife, from the palace behind, 
 which, under the cix'cumstances, must have greatly impressed him. Since 
 the time of Augustus, Eoman magistrates had been permitted to take 
 their wives to the provinces, and tradition has handed down the wife of 
 Pilate — whose name it states was Procla — as a proselyte to Judaism. She 
 had evidentl}^ heard of Jesus, and, having taken a lively interest in Him, 
 was greatly troubled at His arrest and present danger. Her messenger, 
 hastening to Pilate, now whispered an entreaty from her, that he would 
 have nothing to do with condemning this just man ; she had suffered many 
 things through the night in a dream because of Him, and feared Divine 
 vengeance if He were condemned. 
 
 Pilate, guided only by expediency, was at a loss what to do. Unwilling
 
 698 THE LIFE OF CHEIST. 
 
 to give way to the mob, and let loose a fierce enemy of Rome instead of a 
 harmless and evidently lofty-minded enthusiast; certain that the high 
 priests had accused Him only from envy at His influence with the people, 
 and hatred of Him for His opposition to themselves ; half afraid, more- 
 over, especially after his wife's message, to meddle further in the matter ; 
 he once more turned to the crowd, who were still shouting " ISTot this man, 
 but Barabbas," and attempted to carry his point, and save Jesus. 
 
 " Which of the two," cried he, " do you really wish me to release to 
 you? " "Barabbas, Barabbas," roared the multitude. The cry raised by 
 the priests had carried all before it. " What shall I do then," asked Pilate, 
 pale before the storm, " with Jesus, whom you call the Messiah — the King 
 of the Jews ? " He hoped that the sound of titles so dear to their hearts, 
 and so flattering to their pride, would have some effect. But he was 
 bitterly deceived. 
 
 For now, for the first time, rose in answer to him, the fearful words, 
 "To the Ciioss! Crucify Him! crucify Him!" the priests and Rabbis, 
 prelates and doctors of the nation, on the raised platform of the tribunal, 
 shouting first, and the mob below re-echoing the cry far and wide. 
 
 Pilate had failed twice, but he still held out. Appealing a third time to 
 the excited crov/d, he strove to reason with them :— 
 
 " Why shall I crucify Him ? What evil has He done ? He has broken 
 no law. I have found no cause, in anytliiug He has done, to put Him to 
 death. I will, therefore, only scourge Him, and let Him go." 
 
 But he knew not the forces he was opposing. Behind the passions of 
 the priests and Rabbis and people, were the slowly self-fulfilling counsels 
 of the Eternal ! 
 
 The sea of upturned faces again broke into wild uproar, and a thou- 
 sand voices yelled at their fiercest, " Crucify Him ! crucify Him ! " 
 
 The six days of CiBsarea, when the same crowds had besieged his palace, 
 with the unbroken ci-y, which not even imminent death could still— the 
 six days, when their invincible tenacity had forced him to humble himself 
 before them and let them triumph — rose in Pilate's mind. 
 
 " It will be another uproar like that," thought he ; " I must yield while 
 I can, and save myself." Poor mockery of a ruler ! Set by the Eternal 
 to do right on earth, and afraid to do it; told so by his own bosom; strong 
 enough in his legions, and in the truth itself, to have saved the Innocent 
 One, and kept his own soul, he could only think of the apparently expe- 
 dient. Type of the politician of all ages who forgets that only the right is 
 the strong or wise ! 
 
 Not daring in his weakness to play the man and do right, Pilate was 
 yet determined that even those at a distance, who might not hear his dis- 
 avowal of any willing share in the condemnation of Christ, should be 
 made to see it. To wash the hands in water is a natural symbol so ex- 
 pressive of repudiation of responsibility, that it had been adopted by Jews 
 and heathen alike. As long before as the days of Moses, the elders of a 
 city, near y/hich the body of a slain man had been found, were required to 
 wash their hands over a slaughtered heifer, and declare their innocence. 
 To wash the hands in innocency was already a common expression in the
 
 BEFORE PILATE. G99 
 
 days of David, and it was familiar to both Greeks and Tlomans. Calling, 
 therefore, for water, Pilate went towards his ofRcial cluiiv, and with sig- 
 nificant gestures, washed his hands, calling aloud as ho did so, " That as 
 his hands were clean before them, so was he himself, of all guilt in the 
 blood of tliis Man. It is on you; you may answer for it as you best can!" 
 
 " Yes ! yes ! " cried the furious priests and rabble, "willingly ! AVe and 
 our chikben Avill take the blame ! His blood be on us and our children if 
 He be slain unjustly." 
 
 •' Then you may hare His blood," thought Pilate ; " I have done my 
 Ijest to save Him ! " So do men deceive themselves ; as if they could wasli 
 their conscience clean as easily as their hands ! They fancy they have 
 fulfilled to the utmost their acknowledged duty, when they have not done 
 precisely the first indispensable and decisive act. They weary themselves, 
 toiling along a thousand crooked ways, which cannot lead them to their 
 end, and turn aside from the path of unhesitating, immovable right— the 
 way nearest to them, and the shortest, after all ! 
 
 The Innocent One had gained nothing but evil by all the windings and 
 doublings of the scheming and trimming Roman. Pilate had proposed as 
 a compromise with His accusers, to save His life by delivering Him over 
 to the shame and agony of scourging, though He had, confessedly, done 
 nothing amiss. He was now to be both scourged and crucified. 
 
 Victims condemned to the cross first underwent the hideous torture of 
 the scourge, and this was immediately inflicted on Jesus. Pilate, forth- 
 with, commanded it to be carried out. " Go, bind His hands, and let Him 
 be beaten," was the order for this terrible prelude to crucifixion. 
 
 Roman citizens were still exempted, by various laws, from this agonizing 
 and painful punishment, which was employed sometimes to elicit con- 
 fessions, sometimes as a substitute for execution, and, at others, as the 
 first step in capital sentences. It was in full use in the provinces, and 
 lawless governors did not scruple to enforce it even on Roman citizens, in 
 spite of its acknowledged illegality. Jesus was now seized by some of tho 
 soldiers standing near, and after being stripped to the waist, was boimd in 
 a stooping posture. His hands behind His back, to a post, or block, near 
 the tribunal. He was then beaten at the pleasure of the soldiers, with 
 knots of rope, or plaited leather thongs, armed at the ends with acorn- 
 shaped drops of lead, or small, sharp-jiointed bones. In many cases not 
 only was the l^ack of the person scourged cut open in all directions ; even 
 the ejos, the face, and the breast, were torn, and. the teeth not seldom 
 knocked out. The judge stood by, to stimulate the sinewy executioners 
 by cries of " Give it him "■ — but we may trust that Pilate, though his office 
 required him to be present, spared himself this crime. 
 
 Under the fury of the countless stripes, tl)e victims sometimes sank — 
 amidst screams, convulsive leaps, and distortions— into a senseless heap; 
 sometimes died on the spot ; sometimes v/cre taken away an unrecognisable 
 mass of bleeding flesh, to find deliverance in death, from the inflammation 
 and fever, sickness and shame. 
 
 The scourging of Jesus was of the severest ; for the soldiers, employed 
 as lictors in the absence of these special officials, who were not allowed to
 
 700 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 procuratoi'S, only too gladly vented on any Jew the grndge they bore the 
 nation, and they would, doubtless, try if they could not force out the con- 
 fession which His silence had denied to the governor. Besides, He was to 
 be crucified, and the harder the scourging the less life would there be 
 left, to detain them afterwards on guard at the cross. What He must 
 have endured is pictured to us by Eusebius in the epistle of the Chui^ch in 
 Smyrna. " All around were horrified to see them (the martyrs)," says he, 
 " so torn with scourges that their very veins were laid bare, and the inner 
 muscles and sinews, and even the very bowels, exposed." 
 
 The scourging over — Pilate, as his office required, standing by, to hear 
 any confession that might be made— Jesus was formally delivered over to 
 a military officer, with the authorization to see Him crucified. He had 
 been scourged in the open grounds before the palace gate, close to the 
 tribunal, but was now led, still half-naked, with painful, bleeding steps, 
 into the inner court of the palace, in which, as the trial was over, the 
 whole cohort — no longer needed outside — was massed, to be ready for any 
 attempt at rescue. His guards next put some of His clothes on the 
 quivering body. For this His own humble under garments contented 
 them, in part ; but the brutal humour of the guard-room was free to vent 
 itself on a condemned man, and the lofty claims of Christ, and His hated 
 nationality, excited it to the keenest. Instead of His plain abba of linen, 
 therefore, they threw over His shoulders a scarlet sagum or soldier's cloak, 
 as a rough burlesque of the long and fine purple one worn only by the 
 Emperor. One of them, running to the nearest open space, heightened 
 the coarse and shameful merriment by bringing in some of the tough 
 twigs of the thorny Nubk, which he twisted into a mock laurel wreath, 
 like that worn at times by the Caesars, and forced down, with its close 
 sharp thorns, on our Saviour's temples. The Nubk even yet grows, on 
 dwarf bushes, outside the walls of Jerusalem. A last supreme touch, to 
 complete the ridicule, was at hand, in one of the long reeds, used in many 
 ways in Jewish houses, and hence easily procured. Placed in His hand, 
 the mock king had a sceptre ! It only remained to pay Him a show of 
 homage, and this they did on their knees, saluting Him with mock oaths 
 of allegiance, " Hail, King of the Jews." The courtyard rang with peals 
 of laughter. Some of the more brutal could not, however, let things pass 
 so lightly. He was a Jew ; He had claimed to be a king, in opposition, as 
 they fancied, to the Emperor, and He was about to be crucified. They 
 indulged their coarseness, thei-efore, by tearing the stout cane-like reed 
 from His hands, and striking Him with it over the face and head. Others 
 struck Him rudely with their fists : some, in their contempt, even spitting 
 on Him as they did so. The scourging had lasted till the soldiers had 
 done their worst, and now, their unspeakable brutality was left to wear 
 itself out. 
 
 This long passage of insult and mockery was one of the sorest trials of 
 these last sad hours. Yet, through the whole, no complaint escaped His lips. 
 He was being insulted, maltreated, and mocked, as a Jew, while already 
 agonized by the scourging ; but, if His tormentors had known it. He stood 
 where He did, because the Jews hated Him. They ridiculed His claim to
 
 BEFOEE PILATE. 701 
 
 spiritual monarchy as the Messiah ; but had the soldiery known the truth, 
 He was being put to death because He had opposed the Jewish dream, 
 that the Messiah would secure the universal political supremacy of their 
 nation. 
 
 No murmur rose from Him. He miglit have spoken, or sighed, or 
 implored the pity of tlie soldiery ; He might have appealed to their honour 
 and compassion. A heart beats even in the roughest bosom. But He was 
 silent — not because the waves of His sorrows had overwhelmed Him, but 
 in triumphant superiority to them. He had been bowed and crushed in 
 Gethsemane, but now He showed the serene joy of a conqueror. His 
 silence was a mark of His perfect child-like resignation to the will of His 
 Father. He was fulfilling, by His calm endurance, the work of His life, in 
 accordance with the eternal counsels of God, and in holy love for His 
 nation and the world. His kiugly spirit was clouded, to human eyes, by 
 pain and agony, but the end of His life and death shone out the more 
 triumphantly before Him. He was dying to destroy for ever the dead 
 and death-causing ritualism of the past ; as the Founder of a religion of 
 love and freedom and light, and as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of 
 the world, which would open the gates of mercy to man for evermore ! 
 
 Pilate had, apparently, retired into the palace for a time, but now re- 
 appeared ; urged, perhaps, by his wife Procla, to make one more effort to 
 save Jesus. He might have prevented the pitiful roughness of the soldiers 
 had he pleased, and the scourging itself was an injustice, by his own con- 
 fession. He now ordered Him to be brought out once more, tottering with 
 pain and weakness, wearing the scarlet cloak and the crown of thorns, and 
 covered, besides, with the vile proofs of contempt and violence. Even the 
 stony heart of Pilate was touched. 
 
 "Behold," said he, "I have brought Him out to you again, that you may 
 know, once more, that I have found no fault in Him." Then, turning to 
 the figure at his side, drawn together with mortal agony, and looking at 
 the pale, worn, and bleeding face, through which there yet shone a calm 
 dignity and more than human beauty that had touched his heart, and 
 might touch even the heart of Jews, he added, " Behold the Man ! " 
 Would they let the scourging and mockery suffice, after all ? 
 
 But religious hatred is the fiercest of all passions. Jesus had been 
 sleepless through the night; worn with anticipations of the terrible future, 
 and with the sadness of an infinite sorrow ; disfigured by the lawless 
 treatment of the palace-yard, and bowed by the torture of the scoiirgiug ; 
 and now stood, utterly exhausted, before all eyes — yet a Form demanding 
 reverence. 
 
 But the priests were unmoved. What revenge would satisfy their 
 hatred so long as still more could be had ? The siglit of their victim re- 
 doubled their ferocity. Forgetful of their profession and dignity, the 
 chief priests — the primate and prelates of the day — their servants and 
 the servile crowd echoing their cry, answered the procurator's appeal only 
 by loud shouts of " Crucify ! Crucify ! " 
 
 " Take ye Him, then, and crucify Him, if it must be so," answered 
 Pilate. " I have found Him blameless of any offence against Ptoman law
 
 702 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 for -wliicli I could coudemn Him." As if he wished to say, " I Avill not be 
 your mere tool ! " 
 
 The first accusation had therefore failed, and was dropped. But the 
 priests were determined to have His life, and forthwith demanded it on a 
 new ground. 
 
 " He shall not escape with life ! " cried their spokesman. " If He has 
 committed no crime worthy of death by Koman law, we have a Jewish law 
 Avhicli He has outraged, and by it He must die. He has claimed to be the 
 Son of God — the Messiah — which He is not, and for that, by our law, 
 which thou hast sworn to ujahold, He has been sentenced to death— ))y 
 stoning, in any case ; by the cross, if thou allowest it. Thou art bound to 
 uphold our decision and confirm our sentence." 
 
 Thousands were eager to put Jesus to death, with Pilate's jDermission or 
 without, now that the high priests had roused their fanaticism. The 
 zealots would do it as a meritorious act. But such an outbreak Pilate 
 dreaded. He would, therefore, have yielded without hesitation, but even 
 to his frivolous soul there was an ominous sound in the name " Son of 
 God." Might he be braving the wrath of the G ods, and what, comi^ared 
 to that, was the utmost these wretched Jews could do ? 
 
 The irresolute man — with no force of character, and too unprincipled to 
 be an upright judge, if the right were not first of all politic — was alarmed. 
 Perhaps, if he brought Jesus before him, privately, once more, a way out 
 of the dilemma would present itself. There was also that dream of Procla 
 to frighten him. 
 
 Eetiring, therefore, into the palace, he ordered Jesus to be set before 
 him again. 
 
 "What was that they said," asked he, "about Thy being the Son of God? 
 Whence comest Thou ? Art Thou of human birth or more p " 
 
 The dignity of spotless innocence, outraged by the very representative 
 of justice, forbade a rejaly. Anything He might have said, however clear, 
 would moreover have been unintelligible to the heathen governor, with his 
 utter want of moral earnestness, and would have been fruitless. Jesus 
 therefore remained silent. Pilate had abundant means of judging from 
 the past, and, besides, it was no question of birth or origin, but a simple 
 matter of uprightness he was called on to decide. If his prisoner were 
 innocent, he had a right to be set free, whoever He might be. 
 
 Pilate's pride was touched by the silence. His momentary tenderness 
 turned into towering passion ; for power, when it feels itself in the wrong, 
 is the more ready to di-own conscience by violence towards the weakness 
 it wrongs. " Do you refuse to answer Me ? " he asked, in flashing anger. 
 " Do you not know that your life is in my hands, and hangs on my nod ? 
 That I can crucify, or release Thee, at my pleasvire ? " 
 
 Had he been self-possessed at the moment, and able to ponder things 
 aright, he would have seen an answer to his question, even in Christ's 
 silence. For it is certain that He in whose lips no deceit was ever found, 
 would, on the instant, have honourably confessed that He was only a man, 
 had lie been no more. His very silence was a testimony to His Divine 
 dignity.
 
 BEFORE PLLATE. 703 
 
 But He was now silent no longer. "You liave indeed," said He, "power 
 over me, but you would have none were it not given you from God above. 
 But your sin, though great, in condemning me against your conscience, 
 and exercising on me the power granted you by God, is not so great as 
 that of others ; for you are only an instrument in His hands to carry out 
 His counsels. The chief guilt lies on those who have delivered me to you, 
 to force you to carry out their will against me. Theirs is the greater sin ! " 
 Even in His lowliest humiliation. He is tender and pitiful to the man who 
 has done Him so much wrong, and bears Himself towards Him, Eoman 
 governor though he be, as if their respective positions had been reversed. 
 He has nothing to say of His own agonies or unjust treatment, but only 
 warning earnestness at the thought of the sin that was being wrought by 
 men against their own souls. 
 
 The words and the whole conduct of Jesus, struck into the heart of the 
 Soman. Presence of mind and self -respectful dignity, even in the most 
 helpless victim of injustice, have an irresistible power over the oppressor. 
 How much more such a unique grandeur as diffused itself round this 
 mysterious Man ! Pilate was more than ever resolved to release Him. 
 Eeturning once again to the tribunal, Jesus at his side, he strove to bring 
 the priests and the crowd to content themselves with what their victim 
 had already suffered. 
 
 But the priests and Kabbis had hit upon a new.terror for the unrighteous 
 judge. Hardly waiting to hear his first words, they raised a cry, which 
 they and the mob kept shouting till Pilate was thoroughly alarmed and 
 imnerved. " If you let this man go, you are not true to Caesar. Any one 
 that makes himself a king, as He has done, declares himself against Cassar." 
 
 Pilate knew the jealous, suspicious character of Tiberius, and feared his 
 displeasure the more, because his conscience told him how he had abused 
 his office by every form of tyranny, so that an appeal to Rome might well 
 be fatal to him. Should he expose himself to the displeasure of the 
 Emperor .P He was ready for any act of weak unrighteousness, rather than 
 brave a censure from Capreae, far less the risk of imperial vengeance. He, 
 perhaps, tried to believe that he could not, in any case, save Christ's life, 
 and flattered himself that he had acted with exceptional uprightness. 
 He must, after all, look to himself first. Yfould he bring down on himself 
 a recall, perhaps banishment, or even worse, to save a Jew, because justice 
 demanded his doing so ? " Who, in my position," doubtless thought the 
 mere politician, "would dream of committing such a folly? Shall I sacri- 
 fice myself for any one ? No ! " 
 
 Furious at the priesthood and the rabble, who kept shouting the hateful 
 insinuation that clemency would be treason to Cassar, Pilate once more 
 took his official seat. It was now about nine o'clock, and he had at last 
 given way, though with bitter mortification. He would not, however, 
 surrender without another effort to carry his point, for he was alarmed 
 alike at Jesus and about the Emperor. 
 
 Turning to Jesus, still wearing the crown of thorns and the scarlet 
 cloak, in a burst of unconcealed contempt against the Jews, as impolitic as 
 it was useless, he cried, " Behold your king ! " The only answer was a
 
 70-1 THE LIFE OF CHRIST, 
 
 hurricane of cries, "Away with Him, away with Him, crucify Him!" 
 '•What!" cried Pilate, with Ivcen withering mockery, "shall 1 crucify your 
 king ? " As if to say that one so humiliated and outcast was all the king 
 they deserved. 
 
 Caiaphas and Hannas, and the group round them, wei-e however more 
 than a match for him. They had an answer ready which would force his 
 hand, if he had any thought of still holding out. " We have no king but 
 Ca3sar," rose all round him; "we want no other king!" "The hypocrites," 
 doubtless, thought Pilate, "with the souls of slaves. Tiberius, himself, 
 has not yet ventured to take the name of king, or Lord ; and these, his 
 mortal enemies, priests too, pretending to be the heads of religion, pay 
 him homage as king, without being asked, only to compel me, by their 
 pretended loyalty, to carry out their revenge against 0)ie so much better 
 than themselves." 
 
 It was Friday, and Sabbath — on which nothing could be done — began at 
 sunset. If the execution were delayed, new difficulties might rise from 
 Jewish scruples about the desecration of the holy day, by the exposure of 
 bodies on the cross during its hours. Who, moreover, could tell what 
 might happen if the followers of Jesus rose against His enemies, during 
 this respite, to release their Teacher. Besides, Pilate felt he could not 
 now save Him, and wished the whole matter over as soon and as quietly as 
 possible. 
 
 He therefore, at last, gave the final order for crucifixion. 
 
 CHAPTER LXIII. 
 
 JUDAS — THE CRUCIFIXION. 
 
 A MONG the spectators of the trial and condemnation, was one who was 
 ■^-^ far enough from joining in the cries of the high priests, and their 
 satellites, — Judas Iscariot. Whatever might have been his thoughts while 
 sustained by excitement, he had no sooner seen Jesus led away from the 
 garden by the Roman soldiers than all changed. The excitement was over; 
 the whirlwind of evil, on which his spirit had for the time ridden, was 
 spent, and in its place had come the awful calm of retrospect and reflection. 
 He was no longer needed by his employers, and found himself, though 
 lately flattered and rewarded, now cast ignominiously aside as the traitor 
 he w^as. The great moon, the silent night, his loneliness after such agita- 
 tion, the sudden breaking up of the past, the vision of the three years now 
 so tragically ended; echoes and remembrances of the love and Divine 
 goodness of the Master he had betrayed; a sudden realization of the 
 infinite future— with its throne, its unerring Jiidge, the assembled universe, 
 the doom of the guilty, and the joy of the faithful— acted and reacted on 
 his heart and brain. 
 
 It may be he had stood, pale with remorse and anxiety, through all the 
 incidents of the trial, hoping against hope that his Master would at last 
 put forth His supernatural power, and deliver Himself, as he had expected. 
 It is quite possible that Judas acted as he had done to precipitate a crisis.
 
 JUDAS — THE CRUCIFIXION. 705 
 
 and compel Jesus to such a display of His power as would, even against | 
 His will, force on Him the assumption of the worldly Messianic dignity, i 
 from which the iinhappy fallen man had dreamed of political greatness 
 and rich official state. 
 
 To his unspeakable horror, he found all his calculations miscarry. Per- 
 haps after waiting amongst the crowd before Pilate, as well as outside the 
 palace of Caiaphas, he had heard the shouts of the priests and the mob, 
 the sound of the knout falling on the bleeding back, the awful demand for 
 The Choss — that image of lowest degradation and extremest agony — and 
 last of all, the fatal utterance of Pilate, " I, miles, expedi cruccm," " Go, 
 soldier, prepare the cross." Tiiey had fallen in a Sodom-like fire-rain on 
 his soul, and he felt himself, already, the accursed of time and eternity. 
 The light of life passed into the darkness visible of despair. Which way 
 he looked Avas hell ; himself was hell. 
 
 Hurrying to the Temple with his wretched gain, for which he had 
 bartered away his inheritance of one of the twelve thrones of the resurrec- 
 tion, and an apostle's glory here, in the heavenly kingdom his Master had 
 foimded, he sought to thrust it back again on the priests from whom he 
 had got it, as the wages of guilt — paid beforehand, to quicken his zeal. 
 But though willing to prop up their Temple system by murder, they would 
 on no account compromise their own ceremonial purity or that of the 
 sacred treasury, by taking back the coin, which they themselves had pol- 
 luted by paying as the price of crime. They could see the stain of the 
 blood on the shekels, but not on their own souls. Judas had served their 
 purpose, and was nothing to them now. He had in his agony pressed into 
 the very court of the priests, where they were gathered — ground sacred 
 to consecrated feet. " Would they do nothing yet to save his Master ? 
 He had not expected they would go to such awful extremes. Jesus was 
 innocent. All he had said against Him was untrue. Would they not, for 
 their holy office sake, for the sake of the holy spot on which they then 
 were, undo the awful offence ? " 
 
 He might as well have spoken to the marble pavement on which they 
 stood with bare feet, in outward reverence of the Holy of Holies close by. 
 The stone was not more impassive than their hearts. " What is it to us," 
 answered they, " what you have done ? That is your own affair. See you 
 to it." But if he could not move them, he could at least so far clear him- 
 self by casting back among them the money with wdiich they had hired 
 him. Throwing it on the pavement, therefore, he went out, perhaps in the 
 darkness of early morning— for possibly he did not wait for the last acts 
 of the trial, but had been overwhelmed by the condemnation of Jesus by 
 the Jewish authorities— and hanged himself in a spot of ground, till then 
 known as the clay-j-ard of a potter of the town, but thenceforth as the 
 Field of Blood. Nor was even this the end ; for the cord by which he had 
 suspended himself gave way, and he fell beneath, ruptured and revolting. 
 
 To put into the treasury money defiled from any cause, was unlawful. 
 To what could the authorities apply it ? How, better, than to buy the 
 worn-out clay pit, already unclean by the suicide of Judas, for the further 
 pollution of a graveyard. There was need of a spot in which to bury 
 
 z z
 
 706 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 foreign Jews who might die in Jerusalem. So the scene of the traitor's 
 death became doubly a " field of blood." 
 
 Meanwhile, preparations were being rapidly made for crucifixion. 
 
 Death by the cross was the most terrible and the most dreaded and 
 shameful punishment of antiquity— a punishment, the very name of which, 
 Cicero tells us, should never come near the thoughts, the eyes, or ears of 
 a Roman citizen, far less his person. It was of Eastern origin, and had 
 been in use among the Persians and Carthaginians long before its emiiloy- 
 ment in Wes-tern countries. Alexander the Great adopted it in Palestine, 
 from the Phenicians, after the defence of Tyre, which ho punished by 
 crucifying two thousand citizens, when the place surrendered. Crassus 
 signalized its introduction into Roman use by lining the road from Capua 
 to Rome with crucified slaves, captured in the revolt of Spartacus, and 
 Augustus finally inaugurated its general use, by crucifying six thousand 
 slaves at once, in Sicily, in his suppression of the war raised by Sextus 
 Pompeius. 
 
 It Avas not a Jewish punishment, for the cases mentioned in the Old 
 Testament of "hanging up" criminals or offenders refer only to their dead 
 bodies, or were imitations of the heathen custom, by some of the kings. 
 For Jews to crucify a Jew would, indeed, have been impossible, as the 
 national sentiment would have revolted from it. The cruelty of heathen-- 
 ism had to be invoked by the corrupt and sunken priesthood, before such 
 a death could be inflicted on any member of the nation, far less on one 
 declared by the procurator himself to be innocent. It Avas the punishinent 
 inflicted by Rome — which knew no compassion or reverence for man as 
 luan— on the worst criminals, on highway robbers, rebels, and slaves, or 
 on provincials, who in the eyes of Romans were only slaves, if they fell 
 into crime. 
 
 The cross used at Calvary consisted of a strong post, which was carried 
 beforehand to the place of execution, and of two cross pieces, borne to the 
 spot by the victim, and afterwards nailed to the uprights so that they 
 slanted forward, and let the sufferer lean on his stretched-out hands, and 
 thus relieve the pressure of his body downwards. A stout rough wooden 
 pin, in the middle of the upright post, supplied a seat of fitting agony, for 
 the weight of the body would otherwise have torn it from the cross. 
 
 While everything was being prepared, Jesus was again exposed in the 
 guard-room to the insults of the soldiery. At last, however, all was ready, 
 and the scarlet cloak was now removed. His own linen abba being 
 replaced. It was the custom, as I have said, for offenders themselves to 
 carry the transverse pieces of their cross, and these, therefore, were laid 
 on the shoulders of Christ, faint as He was with mental and bodily distress. 
 A detachment of the cohort which had been kept in the court of the palace, 
 in case of disturbance, Avas marched out under a centurion to guard the 
 procession to the place of death, the officer being responsible for the due 
 execution of the sentence. Jesus was not, however, to die alone. Two 
 more prisoners were led off to suffer with Him ; men convicted not of mere 
 insurrection, but of robbery — the special trouble of the land in these evil 
 times, even till Jerusalem perished. Pilate could hardly have intended to
 
 JUDAS — THE CRUCIFIXION. 707 
 
 degrade Jesus in the eyes of tlie Jews by associating Him with enemies of 
 society; but the thoughtlessness which permitted his forming such a group 
 of A-ictims, simply to empty his prison, and get through the annual Easter 
 executions at once, shows how superficial an impression had been made on 
 his light nature by all that had passed. His seriousness had been written 
 in water; heartlessness and utter want of moral sincerity wore his pre- 
 vailing mood. 
 
 And now the sad procession began. It was about ten in the forenoon, 
 for at least an hour had been spent in getting ready. The soldiers stepped 
 into their ranks, and the prisoners were set, under guard, in their places, 
 each carrying, hung from his neck, a whitened board, stating in large 
 black letters tlie offences for which he was ajjout to die ; unless, indeed, 
 as in some cases, a soldier bore it before them. Each, also, carried the 
 cross beams of his cross, fastened together like the letter V, with his arms 
 bound to the projecting ends. 
 
 It is vain to attempt to follow the route, for the whole surface of Jeru- 
 salem has changed since then. Roman London is reached only at a depth 
 of sixteen or seventeen feet, though the history of our island is com- 
 paratively peaceful ; but Jerusalem has stood siege after siege till the 
 streets of Christ's day are buried below the ruins of successive cities. All 
 we know is that the place of execution was outside the walls, to the north- 
 west, at the side of a leading road, to let the spectacle be seen by the 
 crowds passing and repassing. From the palace of Herod, the sad pro- 
 cession must have passed out under the shadow of the great castles of 
 Hippicus, Phasael, and Mariamne, thi'ough the Hebron or Jaffa Gate, or 
 the Gate Gennath. As it moved slowly on, an official proclaimed aloud 
 the names of the prisoners, and the offences for which they were about to 
 die. Four soldiers walked beside each, as the special guard and execu- 
 tioners, the rest of the detachment preceding and following. 
 
 As it moved through the narrow streets, a great crowd accompanied it. 
 The Temjole had special claims on the citizens in the Passover week, and 
 besides, it would soon be Sabbath, and they were busy with their worldly 
 affairs, and loath to afford the time ; yet many, both friends and enemies, 
 pressed after the soldiers. The women especially, less easily diverted 
 from sorrow and pity, either by religious rites or every-day duties, 
 thronged to see One of whom they had heard so much led out to die. In 
 the East, men and women, even man and wife, never appear in public to- 
 gether, and hence all were free to show then- feelings independently. The 
 Galilosans in the city had been taken by surprise, and had had no time to 
 gather at the trial and show sympathy with their countryman, whom ■so 
 many of them reckoned as a prophet. Only fanatical Jerusalem, to which 
 the cry of the ^oriests was law, and to whom Jesus, as a supposed enemy 
 of the Temple — the idol at once of their bigotry and their pocket— was 
 doubly hateful, had learned of the arrest in the early morning, and had 
 gathered to yell down Pilate's proposals of release. 
 
 Two incidents only are recorded of the march to the place of execution. 
 The beams laid on Jesus soon proved too heavy, in the hilly sti-eets, for 
 His exhausted strength, and His slow advance with them so delayed tho
 
 708 THE LIFE OF CIIKIST. 
 
 procession that the guard grew impatient, and having seized a passer-by 
 coming from the country, compelled him to bear them. The involuntaiy 
 cross-hearer was a foreign Jew, called Simon, from Cja-ene, in North 
 Africa — now part of Tunis, but then in the province of Libya. Ptolemfeus 
 Lao-i had carried off a hundred thousand Jews from Palestine, and settled 
 them in those regions of North Africa, and in three hundred years they 
 had increased so greatly in numbers, that a special synagogue was erected 
 in Jerusalem for the pilgrims they yielded to the great feasts. Simon's 
 appeai'ance marked him as a foreigner, for, in the East, all nationalities 
 have their distinctive dress, and, as a stranger, the infamy of ])eing made 
 to carry a cross would be less likely to cause a stir. It may be that he 
 showed sympathy with Jesu*; but, in any case, his service to Him appears 
 to have resulted in his conversion, with all his family ; for it is easy to 
 believe the tradition that the "Rufus and his mother," of whom St. Paul, 
 a quarter of a century later, speaks so tenderly, were his wife and one of 
 the two sons, Alexander and Rufus, mentioned by St. Mark as known to 
 his readers. 
 
 From the moment of His declaring Himself the Messiah, and being 
 condemned to die for doing so, Jesus had had nothing more to say to His 
 judges. No cry of pain, no murmur of impatience escaped Him. He had 
 realized to the full all that the victorious completion of His work, through 
 self-sacrifice, demanded, and bore indignities and agonies with unbroken 
 submission. He was dying to free mankind from the bondage of the 
 letter ; to break for ever the chains of Rabbinism and priestly caste from 
 the human soul ; to inaugurate the reign of spiritual religion ; and, above 
 all, to atone for man's sin, and then enter into His glory with the Father. 
 In the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the joy set before Him 
 strengtheued Him to endure the cross, and despise the shame. 
 
 But His lips, shut for hours, opened once more on the way to His death. 
 The road was lined with spectators, many of whom did not attempt to 
 conceal their sympathy ; and a great crowd followed, both of men and 
 women — the latter filling the air with loud lamentations and wailings. 
 Touched with their grief, so strangely sweet after such a long bitterness 
 of mockery and clamorous hatred, the Innocent One stopped on His way, 
 and turning to them, bade them lament, not for Him, but for themselves. 
 
 "Daughters of Jerusalem," said He, "weep not for me, but weep for 
 youi'selves." His death was the fulfilment of the counsels of God, and 
 His apparent overthrow was His real and .eternal victory. They might 
 have wept for Him, had He shrunk from corajjleting the work given Him 
 to-do, and failed to perfect the great plan of human salvation. "Weep 
 for yourselves and for your children. The fate of Jerusalem, which I love 
 so well, is sealed, and will be sad indeed compared with my momentary 
 pains. For if your enemies do these things to me, a green fruit-bearing 
 tree that deserves to live and be cherished — me, pronounced guiltless even 
 by the judge himself— what will they do with the dry and worthless tree 
 of the nation, guilty before God and man? Israel is a dry, leafless trunk 
 that will bear no more fruit, but is doomed to the burning. What will be 
 its fate, if mine, who am green and fresh in innocence, be what it is ?
 
 JUDAS — THE CEUCIFIXION. 709 
 
 Yet the green, cut dowu, will sprout again, but the dry -will perish for 
 evermore ! In that day the curse of ages of sin and hypocrisy will over- 
 whelm your city and Temple, with its watchers and shepherds." 
 
 He had always loved children, and had often pressed them to His heart 
 and carried them in His arms; but the vision of the awful future rising 
 before Him Avas darkened by this very tenderness. To bear children was 
 the glory of every Jewish wife; but now He told them that, in after years, 
 they would call her blessed who had never borne. " Your nation has not 
 known the day of its visitation ; it has pushed back my hand when I 
 offered it life here and hereafter ; it has killed its prophets and stoned 
 them that were sent to it from God ; and at last the things of its peace are 
 hid from its eyes. Instead of life let it wish a grave, ere its despairing 
 cry rises, that the mountains should fall on it, and the hills cover it from 
 the avenging wrath of God." Words of tender human love, welling up 
 from the depths of a sacred pity, even under the shadow of the cross ! 
 
 The spot on which the crosses were to be erected stood near some of the 
 gardens of the suburbs, and was known by the Aramaic name, Golgotha, 
 of which Cranion,"a skull," given as the name by St. Luke, writing for 
 Gentiles, is the Greek translation, and Calvaria, Calvary, the Latin. From 
 a fancied allusion to the shape of a skull, tradition has handed it down as 
 a hill ; but all the four Gospels call it simply a place, as if it had its name 
 only from its bare smoothness and slight convexity, as we speak of the 
 hroio of a hill from its rounded slope. It may have been the usual place 
 of execution, but there is nothing in the name to lead to the belief ; for, in 
 that case, it would have been spoken of as a place of slculls, had they been 
 permitted to lie unburied in Judea, which was impossible. 
 
 The cross pieces were nailed in their places on the upright posts, some- 
 times before, sometimes after, the ])osts themselves had been set up. 
 Jesus and His fellow-sufferers, in either case, were now stripped, as they 
 had been before they were scourged— a linen cloth at most being left 
 round their loins. The centre cross was set apart for our Lord, and He 
 was either laid on it as it lay on the ground, or lifted and tied to it as it 
 stood upright. His arms stretched along the two cross beams, and His 
 body resting on the projecting pin of rough wood, misnamed a seat. The 
 most dreadful part then followed ; for, though even the Egyptians only 
 tied the victims to the cross, the Eomans and Cai'thaginians added to the 
 torture, by driving a huge nail through the palm of each hand, into the 
 wood. The legs were next bent up till the soles of the feet lay flat on the 
 upright beam, and then they, too, were fastened, either separately, by two 
 great iron nails, or over each other, by one. 
 
 A single touch of humanity was permitted during these preparations — 
 the offer of a draught of the common sour wme drunk by the soldiery, 
 mingled with some stupefying bitter drug, usually myrrh. The ladies of 
 Jerusalem made it, indeed, their special task to provide it for all con- 
 demned persons. But Jesus would take nothing to cloud His faculties, 
 even though it miglit mitigate His pain. The cross was now lifted up and 
 planted in the ground, with a rough shock of undescribable agony. It was 
 perhaps then that the first words uttered on it rose from His lips: "Father,
 
 710 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 forgive tliem, for they know not wliat they do,"— words breathing love, 
 patience, submission, gentleness, and goodv/ill, not only towards the 
 soldiers, who were the blind servants of power, but even to Pilate and 
 Caiaphas, Hannas and Jerusalem ! 
 
 Racked by the extremest pain, and covered with every indignity which 
 men were wont to heap on the greatest criminals ; forsaken and denied by 
 His disciples, no sigh escaped His lips, no cry of agony, no bitter or falter- 
 ing word ; only a prayer for the forgiveness of His enemies. They had 
 acted in blindness, under the impulse of religious and political fanaticism; 
 for, to use St. Paul's words, had they known it, they would not have cruci- 
 fied the Lord of Glory. They thought, without doubt, that they were doing 
 a service well-pleasing to God in putting Him to death. It stood Avritten 
 in the books of Moses, " Cursed be he who does not fulfil the words of the 
 law to do them," and tliey fancied they were obeying this command in 
 crucifying Him for slighting their additions, which they confounded with 
 the word of God. In spite of all their school learning they were blind to 
 the true meaning of the Scriptures ; though this ignorance was not guilt- 
 less, for He had sought for three years to rouse them to a better know- 
 ledge. But their guilt was in some measure lessened by the influence on 
 their minds of education and the prescriptions of centuries, which had 
 shut their eyes to the light He brought them. His prayer that His 
 heavenly Father would pardon them was only a last utterance of the love 
 of whicli He had been the embodiment and expression through life, and 
 the fitting illustration of His words, that He caine to call the sick, not 
 those who had no need of a physician. 
 
 The " title " that had been borne before Him, or hung from His neck, was 
 now nailed on the jorojecting top of the cross, over His head. That all 
 classes might be able to read it, Pilate had it written in the three languages 
 of the country — the Aramaic of the people, the Latin of the Romans, and 
 the Greek of the foreign population. It proclaimed Him The King or 
 THE Jews, but seems to have run differently in each language, to judge 
 from the variations in the Gospels. 
 
 ISTo tribute could have been more fitting or more prophetic than an 
 inscription which revealed unconsciously the relation of tlie Cross to all 
 the nationalities of the world. The crucifixion was now completed, and 
 there only remained the weary interval till death came to deliver the suf- 
 ferers from their agonies. Meanwhile the troops, with their centurion, 
 kept the ground and guarded the three crosses, for they were answerable 
 with their lives for the due carrying out of the execution. 
 
 The four soldiers — a quaternion— specially detailed to carry out tlie 
 sentence of the procurator, were now free to appropi-iate, as their perqui- 
 sites, the clothes of the three victims. The outer garments of Jesus they 
 divided into four shares — tearing the larger, to make the division equal, 
 for they were not worth keeping entire. The inner robe, however, like the 
 robes of the priests, was of one piece, woven from the top without any seam 
 or stitching, and v/ould be destroyed by rending. The dice were ready in 
 their pockets, and one of their brazen helmets would serve to throw them ; 
 it would be better to cast lots for this, and let him who won the highest
 
 JUDAS — THE CRUCIFIXION. 711 
 
 numljcr keep it for himself — and so it was done. No wonder that both 
 Matthew and John, looking back on the scene, Avcro struck by the fact that 
 it had been written ages before, in the twenty-second Psalm, which tho 
 Jews of that day, as well as Christians, rightly believed to refer to the 
 Messiah: "They parted my garments among them, and for my vesture 
 they cast lots." 
 
 The inscription on the cross had been Pilate's revenge for the condeni- 
 nation of Jesus, wrung from him by the priests. To proclaim Him, the 
 villager of Nazareth, as the King of the Jews, marked at once what, iu his 
 opinion, was fitting for them, and flung in their faces a bitter reproach of 
 having betrayed their own nation and couutr3-raan, to Rome. The au- 
 thorities of the Temple were indignant, aud yet alarmed, and applied to 
 him to alter it. But he had suffered enough at their hands, and smarting 
 under his defeat and humiliation, dismissed thena with the laconic answer, 
 "What I have written I have wi'itten." 
 
 Meanwhile the fierce heat of a Syrian noon beat down on tho cross. 
 The suffering in crucifixion, from which death at last resulted, rose partly 
 from the constrained and fixed jiositiou of the body and of the outstretched 
 arms, which caused acute pain from every twitch or motion of the back, 
 lacerated hj the knout, and of the hands and feet, pierced by the nails. 
 These latter were, moreover, driven through parts where many sensitive 
 nerves and sinews come together, and some of these were mutilated, others 
 violently crushed down. Inflammation of the wounds in both bauds and 
 feet speedily set in, and erelong rose also in other places, where the circula- 
 tion was checked by the tension of the parts. Intolerable thirst and ever- 
 increasing pain resulted. The blood, which could no longer reach the 
 extremities, rose to the head, swelled the veins and arteries in it unnatur- 
 ally, and caused the most agonizing tortures in the brain. As, besides, it 
 could no longer move freely from the lungs, the heart grew more aud more 
 oppressed, and all the veins were distended. Had the wounds bled freely, 
 it would have been a great relief ; but there was very little bleeding. The 
 weight of the body itself, resting on the wooden pin of the upright beam ; 
 the burning heat of the sun scorching the veins, and the hot wind drying 
 up the moisture of the body, made each moment more terrible than the 
 preceding. The numbness and stiffness of the more distant muscles 
 brought on painful convulsions, and slowly extending, sometimes through 
 two or three days, at last reached the vital parts, and released the sufferer 
 by death. 
 
 Common pity would have left the victim of such agony to die iu peace. 
 But it is reserved to the malignant hatred and passion which spring from 
 perverted religious zeal to ignore compassion. The title over His head 
 was as offensive to the people as to the priests aud Eabbis, for it was a 
 virtual ridicule of their impotent aspirations after universal monarchy. 
 Beneath tho cross rose the same cruel mockery as the procurator had 
 thought not beneath the dignity of Rome. The fierce crowd had heard 
 repeatedly that clay of Jesus having said, as was asserted, that He could 
 destroy their magnificent Tcmi:)le, and rebuild it in three days. They had 
 heard also a great deal about His miracles, and of His calling Himself the
 
 712 THE LIFE OF CHUIST, 
 
 Son of God; but it .seemed as if the whole must liavc been a dccepiioii, 
 else why would He aiioAV Himself to die such a death ? There were taunts 
 and bitter gibes from the mob and the soldiers, and triumphant sneers at 
 His having met the fate He deserved ; even the chief priests and Ilal>bis 
 and elders, indeed, among their own knots and groups, degraded them- 
 selves to the level of the raljble in their unmanly taunts. " Thou that 
 destroyest the Temple, and buildest it in three days, show that Thou 
 couldst have done so, by saving Thyself, and coming down from the cross," 
 called out a looker-on, with a contemptuous laugh. " If Thou be the Son 
 of God, as Thou sayest," cried another, " come doAvn from the cross." " He 
 Avrought miracles to save others," said a high priest to his fellow, " by the 
 help of Beelzebub, but He cannot save Himself now His master has for- 
 saken Him." The crowd, catching their spirit, bandied from one to another 
 the scoff, " If He be the Christ, the King of Israel, the Chosen of God, let 
 Him descend from the cross, that Ave may see and believe." A true index 
 to their religious ideas ! If they saw Him Avith their bodily eyes, by a 
 miracle, come down from the cross, they would believe ! Their religion 
 rested on their five senses. The invisible spiritual jiower, in which Jesus 
 taught, did His work, and founded His kingdom, had no existence for 
 them. The only authority for their faith was what they could grasp with 
 their hands or see Avitli their eyes. 
 
 Nor was the only railing and trial of bitter mocking fi'om the spectators. 
 Affecting indifference to their own sufferings, and perhaps wishing to win 
 a poor favour with the crowd, in their last hours — perhaps angry that Jesus 
 had left both them and Himself to die, when He might have saved them— 
 the two unhappy men crucified Avith Him cast the same reproaches in His 
 teeth. But a strange contrast was soon to display itself. One of the tAvo, 
 erelong, awed and Avon by His bearing under such treatment — perhaps 
 thinking of the daughters of Jerusalem he had seen Aveeping by the Avay, or 
 of the words of Jesus in Avhich He spoke of the distant future as open before 
 Him ; perhaps struck by the title over the Saviour's head, or by the very 
 taunts Avhich spoke of His having trusted in God, and having claimed to 
 be the Christ, the Chosen, the Sou of the Highest ; perhaps recollecting 
 some Avords of His, heard in happier days — repented of his bitterness, and 
 turned to his companion, to persuade him also to kinder thoughts. " Have 
 you no fear of God," said he, "Avhen you think you are dying the same 
 death as He Avhom you are still reproaching ? It is no time to mock, when 
 you are so near death. Besides, Ave are dying justly, for Ave are receiving 
 the fitting punishment of our deeds ; but this man, as the very procurator 
 has said, has done nothing amiss." 
 
 Then foUoAved Avords which slioAved that his repentance and faith were 
 alike sincere and intelligent. He had been silently watching the meek and 
 patient endurance by his mysterious Fellow-Sufferer, of all that His 
 enemies could do, and had come to the belief that He AA-as, in reality, the 
 Messiah He declared Himself to be. With death near, the folly of the 
 earthly dreams of his countrymen — for he must have been a Jcav — flashed 
 on his mind. As tlie Messiah, He AA'ho now hung in agony must have a 
 Kingdom of Avhicli death could not deprive Him, and it must be in the
 
 JUDAS — THE CEUCIFIXION. 713 
 
 world beyond, since He had only a cross here. He -would doubtless enter 
 on it, as even the Eabbis taught, at the resurrection of the dead, and reign 
 over it for all future ages. 
 
 " Lord," said he, therefore, turning as far as he could towards Jesus 
 as he spoke, " remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom." 
 
 " This day," replied Jesus, '"' thou shalt be with me in Paradise." 
 
 To have confessed his faith when Christ hung on the cross, and was 
 deserted even by His Apostles, won for him the high reward of being the 
 first trojjhy of the victory that cross achieved. His ideas might be vague 
 and obscure enough ; but the broken heart and trustful love which ixttercd 
 them made them dear to the Saviour. Angry blasphemies alone had 
 hitherto greeted Him, but now came this prayer, dropping like balm on 
 His wounded spirit! Calmly, and with the bounty of a king — though now 
 nailed to the cross— He showed His answering love by the gift of Divine 
 pardon of sin, and the bestowment of a crown in Paradise ! 
 
 The Eleven had never gathered again after the arrest, having been too 
 much alarmed even to venture singly into the crowd which stood outside 
 the cordon of troo]is round the three crosses. John, alone, showed courage 
 enough to follow Plis Master to Calvary, and to cheer Him by the proof of 
 fidelity in at least one heart. Christ had, indeed, foreseen that He would 
 be deserted thus in His hour of need ; but He was too near His triumph 
 to notice their absence as otherwise He might. The veil between Him 
 and His eternal glory Avas, each moment, fading into the upper light, and 
 had He not, even now, won the first triumph of His redeeming love, to 
 bear with Him to heaven ? 
 
 The last sight wo have of John, before the crucifixion, is in the court- 
 3'ard of the high priest, where his silence and prudent keeping in the 
 background saved him from the danger before which Peter had fallen. 
 He had seen Jesus led away to Pilate, and, apparently, followed Him to 
 the palace, waiting in the angry crowd till the weak time-serving pro- 
 cui'ator had given Him up to the cross. He may have left as soon as the 
 end was known, to hasten into the city with the sad news, to those anxious 
 to hear ; above all, to tell her whose soul the sword was now about to 
 pierce most keenly. Mary, perhaps, heard her Son's fate from his lips. 
 She had come to Jerusalem to be near Him, but we do not know when ; 
 for she was not one of the group of pious Galilsean women who habitually 
 followed Him, though she was with them at this moment. Hoav many 
 were together is not told ; but Mary at least, on hearing John's words, 
 determined, in her love, to go at once to Calvary, and some round her re- 
 solved to go with her. Her own sister, A?ho, it may be, was Salome, the 
 mother of John ; Mary, the wife of Clopas ; and Mary from Magdala, on 
 the banks of Gennesareth, would attend her, and John, faithful as a 
 woman, would not stay behind. 
 
 The first sight the Virgin had of her Son was as He hung on the cross, 
 at the roadside, mocked Ijy the crowd and the passers-by, and scowled at 
 by the high priests and dignitaries, who had come out to glut the hatred 
 they bore Him by the sight of His agony. A supernatural darkness — the 
 sign of the sorrow and wrath of heaven — had fallen on the landscape soon
 
 714 THE LIFE OF CUEIST. 
 
 after tlic nailing to the cross, though it was then high noon; but the Bpec- 
 tators fancied it only a strange incident in the weather. The sufferer had 
 offered His prayer for His murderers, and had spoken words of comfort to 
 the penitent spirit at His side; when, as His eyes Avandercd over the crowd, 
 He saw, through the gloom, John, standing by His mother's side. None of 
 His " brothers or sisters " were there, for it was His resurrection appa- 
 rently that first won them to His cause. Mary, long a widow, was now to be 
 doubly bereaved. John's presence there proclaimed his heart. Tlie sight 
 of His mother in tears ; true even in death ; in spite of danger, or of her 
 broken heart, or of the reproaches rising on every side ; the remembrance 
 of Nazareth ; the thought of the sorrows that so often, in these last years, 
 had pierced her soul, and of the supreme grief that now overwhelmed her; 
 the recognition of the true faith in Him, shining out in these last hours, as 
 born by miracle to be a Saviour, the holy Son of God, and the thought that 
 His earthly relations to her were closed for ever, filled the heart of Jesus 
 with tender emotions. 
 
 Turning His face, now veiled with many sorrows, to her and John, He 
 provided for the one, and honoured thc|^ fidelity of the other. A few words 
 gave Mary a home and another son, and rewarded the friend of His soul 
 by the charge to take the place to^vards Mary which He Himself was 
 leaving. " Woman," said He, in tones of infinite tenderness, " behold in 
 him at thy side thy Son given back to thee." Then, looking at John, he 
 added, " To thee I trust my mother ; let her be thy mother for my sake." 
 
 Need we wonder that the beloved disciple, writing his Gospel in old age, 
 felt a sweet reward in recalling an incident so unspeakably touching ? 
 Mary, henceforth, had a home, for John took her to his own. His love to 
 her Divine Son made him dearer to her than the circle of Nazareth, how- 
 ever related. In Mary, he saw a second mother ; in John, the widowed 
 one saw a son. Nor was this special honour the only reward to John from 
 the cross. His Master had shown, by His thoughts for others rather than 
 Himself, in this time of His greatest need, that He was still what He had 
 always been. Looking up to Him, John saw the light of higher than 
 earthly victory on His pale features, and felt his faith confirmed for ever. 
 
 It was now three o'clock, and Jesus had hung on the cross about three 
 hours. Darkness still lay like a pall over the landscape, as if nature, less 
 insensible than man, refused to look on such a spectacle, or would pre- 
 figure the sadness one day to be spread over all nations for the sin that 
 had caused so awful a sacrifice. What had been passing in His spirit no 
 one can know. As a man He had a nature, in all things except its sinless- 
 ness, like that of the race at large. But he was also the Divine Son of 
 God, for a time in the form of a servant, and now, of His own free love to 
 man, dying as a ransom for sin. We accept the transcendent mystery, but 
 we cannot hope to explain it. The cross was but the culmination of a long 
 martyrdom. His soul had often been sore troubled ; His sighs had been 
 marked even by His disciples. To be dying for the sake of men, and yet 
 to be treated as their foe ; to be misconceived and misrepresented ; to have 
 His heart full of infinite love, and hear, 'even now, only execrations, 
 brought back for a moment the mental agony of Gethsemane. It was the
 
 JUDAS — THE CRUCIFIXION, 715 
 
 "power of darkness;" the final strugle with llie Prince of this World. 
 To the unendurable torture of the hody there was added the unspeakal)le 
 spiritual pain of apparently utter rejection by man, Avliom He loved with a 
 love so Divine ! His Father was with Him in the midst of the darkness 
 as much as in the Transfiguration at Csesarea Philippi, but the gathering 
 clouds and gloom of these last awful hours made it seem, for an instant, 
 as if His face were hidden. The shadow of death passed for a moment 
 in blackness aiid horror over His spirit, and His mental anguish relieved 
 itself by a great cry of distress. The language we have heard from our 
 mother's lips and have spoken in childhood may be laid aside in after years 
 for another, to meet the requirements of life; and Jesus, doubtless, in these 
 last years, had often used the Gi'eek of city communities, instead of His 
 own simple Galila?an. But now, the sounds of infancy, always nearest the 
 heart, and sure to come to the lips in our deepest emotion, returned in His 
 anguish, and in words which He had learned at His mother's knee, His 
 heart uttered its last wail — 
 
 " Eloi ! Eloi ! lama sabachthani ? " 
 " My God ! My God ! why hast Thou forsaken me ? " 
 
 The first words sounded like the name of the great prophet Elijah, the 
 expected herald of the Messiah, and were taken, by some in the crowd, for 
 a cry that he should come to save Him. Meanwhile, one near, more piti- 
 ful than the rest, caring little for the words, saw the agony of which they 
 were the expression, and ran and filled a sponge with the sour wine-and- 
 water of the soldiers, and having fixed it on the short stem of a hyssop- 
 plant growing near, put it to His lips ; for the cross was quite low, tlie 
 feet of Jesus reaching nearly to the ground. 
 
 A moment more, and all was over. The cloud had passed as suddenly 
 as it rose. Ear and wide, over the vanquished throngs of His enemies, 
 with a loud voice, as if uttering His shout of eternal victory before enter- 
 ing into His glory, He cried, 
 
 " It is Finished ! " 
 
 Then, more gently, came the words : — 
 
 " Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit." 
 
 A moment more, and there rose a great cry, as of mortal agony ; the 
 head fell. He was dead. 
 
 The work of salvation was now, at last, completed, prophecy fulfilled, the 
 Ancient Covenant at an end, the New inaugurated. Judaism was for ever 
 obsolete, and the Holy of Holies had ceased to be the peculiar presence- 
 chamber of Jehovah among men. Nor was a sign wanting that it was so; 
 for the gi'eat veil of purple and gold — sixty feet long and thirty broad — 
 before the inner sanctuary of the Temple, suddenly rent itself in two, from 
 the top to the bottom, at the moment of Christ's death ; as if He who had 
 hitherto dwelt there had gone forth to lead up His Eternal Son to His 
 own right hand. And, indeed, not only the yielding veil of the Temple, 
 but the very rocks round Calvary, as St. Matthew tells us, "were rent, 
 and the earth quaked, the graves were opened, and many of the saints 
 sleeping in them rose from the dead, and went into the Holy City, and 
 appeared unto many."
 
 716 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 One incident is recorded of this moment by three of the Evangelists, 
 The centurion in charge of the troops had halted, as he passed tlie cross, 
 ■when Jesus uttered His loud death-cry. He was within a few yards of 
 Him, and must have involuntarily fixed His gazo on TTim at such a sound. 
 He saw the change pass over His features ; the light of life leaving them, 
 and the head suddenly sink. As it did so, the earthquake shook the 
 ground and made the three crosses tremble. But the tremor of the earth 
 affected the Eoman less than the pierciiig cry and sudden death. He had 
 likely attended many crucifixions, but had never seen or heard of a man 
 dying on a cross within three hours. He had never heard a crucified man, 
 strong to the last, utter a shriek that shoAved, as that of Jesus did, the 
 full power of the vital organs to the end. He felt that there was some- 
 thing mysterious in it, and joining Avith it all he had seen and heard of 
 the Sufferer, he broke involuntarily into the words, " Assuredly this man 
 was righteous ; truly this was God's Son." The one expression was, per- 
 haps, equivalent on his lips to the other, but both showed that even 
 thoughtful heathen were profoundly affected by the spectacle they had 
 witnessed. 
 
 Nor was the effect on the spectators less marked. The darkness, the 
 earthquake, and the rending rocks, had filled them with alarm. They had 
 been noisy and ribald enough, for a time ; but when all was over, amidst 
 such strange portents of nature, they were glad to hasten home in silence, 
 with the demonstrations of awe peculiar to Eastern populations— smiting 
 their breasts as they went. The incidents of Calvary had prepared the 
 way for the triumph of Pentecost, as perhaps the rending of the veil had 
 been the first step towards the change of feeling in the great company of 
 priests who soon after professed themselves Christians. 
 
 The Jewish law, as I have said, knew nothing of crucifixion, but it had 
 been not uncommon to hang up the body of a criminal after death. It 
 was not permitted, however, that it should be exposed after sunset ; burial 
 the same day was enacted, " that the land should not be defiled." The 
 Eomans, on the contrary, left the bodies on the cross till they were wasted 
 away, or devoured by the dogs, the jackals, or the ravens, as they fell limb 
 from limb. " To feed the crows on the cross " was a familiar expression. 
 It was necessary, therefore, if the Jewish law were to be honoured, that 
 the permission of Pilate should be given for putting the crucified ones to 
 death, if tliey had not already died, and for taking down and burying their 
 bodies, almost at once. Next day was the great Paschal Sabbath, and 
 only an hour or two remained before it commenced. Three corpses seen 
 on the cross, so near the Temple and the Holy City, on a day so sacred, 
 Avould make great commotion, as polluting the whole place. Besides, the 
 feelings of the people might turn, Avith unknown results. 
 
 A deputation of the Temple authorities, therefore, waited on Pilate, to 
 get his sanction for putting to death any of the three Avho might yet be 
 alive. The common way to do so was in keeping with Eoman brutalit3^ 
 The legs of the unfortunates wei'e broken by IjIoavs of clubs, that the 
 shock might kill them at once, and this Pilate authorized to be done. The 
 tAvo thieves Avere found still living, and the horrible order was forthwith
 
 JUDAS — THE CEUCIFIXION. 717 
 
 executed ou them ; but Jesus was dead already, and tlicj left Him un- 
 touched. One soklier, however— resolved that there should be no doubt- 
 plunged his spear into the Saviour's side, making a gash so wide, that 
 Jesus could afterwards ask Thomas to put his hand into it, and so deep, 
 that blood and water poured out in such a quantity as attracted the notice 
 of John, T/ho was still standing close by. 
 
 That any one should die so soon on the cross, — especially one, like Jesus, 
 in the prime of life, and unweakened by previous ill-health, and in so great 
 vigour as to utter such a shriek as that with which He expired, — appeared 
 even to Christian antiquity to imply some supernatural cause. But the 
 mingled flow of blood and water seems to point unmistakably to another 
 explanation. The immediate cause of death appears, beyond question, to 
 have been the rupture of His heart, brought about by mental agony. 
 Excess of joy or grief is known to induce the bursting of some division of 
 the heart, and the consequent flow of blood into the pericardium, or bag, 
 filled with colourless serum, like water, in which the heart is suspended. 
 In ordinary cases, only examination after death discovers the fact, but in 
 that of our Lord, it was disclosed by the thrust of the soldier's spear. In 
 a death from heart-rupture " the hand lis suddenly carried to the front of 
 the chest, and a piercing shriek uttered." The hands of Jesus were nailed 
 to the cross, but the appalling shriek is recorded. 
 
 Jesus died, literally, of a broken heart ! 
 
 The heat of the climate in the East has led to the custom of burial fol- 
 lowing almost immediately after death, but there wore special reasons for 
 that of Jesus being hurried. It was the eve of the great Passover Sabbath, 
 and no corpse could be left unbmied to defile the ceremonial purity of the 
 Holy City on that day. It was necessary, therefore, that our Lord be 
 buried without a moment's delay, for sunset, when the Sabbath began, 
 was rapidly approaching. 
 
 Bodies of Jewish criminals seem to have been buried '.yith ignominy in 
 the Valley of Hinnom — known, from this reason, as the Valley of Corpses 
 — amidst the unclean dust-heaps of the city, and the ashes of the burned 
 offal of the Temple sacrifices. They could not be laid in the graves of 
 their fathers— the common burial-place of the community — for the guilty 
 could not be buried with the just; but were huddled out of sight, the 
 beheaded or hanged, in one spot, the stoned and burned, in another. But 
 such an indignity was not to befall the sacred form of the Saviour. 
 
 Among the spectators of the crucifixion there had been one, if not two, 
 whose position might have enabled them to be of service to Jesus in His 
 hour of need, before the high priestly court, had they had the moral 
 courage to avow their convictions. Joseph, a member of the ruling class, 
 known by the name of his birthplace, Arimathea, or Ramathaim Zophim, 
 where Samuel the prophet was born, among the " fruitful hills " of Ephraim, 
 had long been a secret disciple; and so, also, had Nicodemus, another 
 member of the theocratic oligarchy. Afraid of the overwhelming opposi- 
 tion they must encounter by supporting Christ, they timidly kept in the 
 background duriiig His trial, though neither voted for the condemnation. 
 Joseph indeed, if not both, even braved public opinion and the wrath of
 
 718 THE LIFE OF CIIIIIST. 
 
 tlicir fcllow-counscllors, by following Jesus to Calvary. Now that lie wag 
 dead, breaking througli all weak reserve and caution at last, he went into 
 the city, and waited on the procurator in his palace, to ask as a favour, 
 that the body of Jesus might be put at his disposal. He would fain honour 
 Ilis lifeless form, if only to show regret and shame for unworthy half- 
 licarteducss while He still lived. The meekness and majestic silence under 
 all reproaches and indignities, the veiled sky, the trembling earth, the 
 prayer of the Sufferer for His murderers. His wail of mental agony as if 
 forsaken, and then the great shriek and sudden death, had awed his soiil 
 and lifted him far above fear of man. He had been waiting for tlie King- 
 dom of God before, but would openly identify himself with its Founder 
 now. 
 
 Pilate was astonished, alike, that a Jew in Joseph's jjosition should make 
 such a request, and that Jesus should already be dead. It was not allowed 
 to remove a body from the cross without formal permission from the pro- 
 curator. The Eleven, with one exception, had left their Master alone amidst 
 His enemies in His last awful hours, and even the women who had watched 
 the cross did not venture to ask the stony-hearted governor to let them pay 
 the last tribute of love to the dead. It was no light matter Joseph had 
 undertaken; for to take part in a burial at any time would defile him for 
 seven days, and make everything unclean which he touched ; and to do so 
 now involved his seclusion through the whole Passover week, with all its 
 holy observances and rejoicings. But, conscience-stricken for the past, he 
 had risen superior alike to prudent inaction or ceremonial i^rejudice, and 
 would render his Master a tribute and service especially sacred in the eyes 
 of a Jew. It was one of the most loved remembrances of the hero Tobit, 
 in the old times of the first exile, that he had buried any Jew whom he 
 found cast out dead, round Nineveh, and Josephus could add no darker 
 horror, a generation later, to the picture of the fall of Jerusalem, than by 
 telling that the Zealots would not bury those slain in the city, or who fell 
 down on the roads. Joseph would not suffer Jesus to want the last offices, 
 with all the indignity the neglect would imply. 
 
 Sending for the officer who had charge of the execution, and finding that 
 Jesus Avas really dead, Pilate granted Joseph's strange request. A brave 
 deed had had its success. The humour of the procurator could not be 
 counted on, and the rage of Joseph's own party was certain. In later days 
 a servant. Porphyrins, who ventured to ask from the procurator Firmilian, 
 the body of his martyred master, the presbyter Pamphilus, for burial, was 
 himself seized and put to death. The apocryphal Acts of Pilate describe 
 Joseph as beseeching the favour with tears and entreaties, and they thus 
 rightly mark the gravity of his act ; but it is not unlikely that a meaner 
 influence came to his help, for Philo tells us that Pilate's special character- 
 istic was his openness to a bribe. Two or three thousand denarii from the 
 Avealthy supplicant would weigh more than his entreaties, in securing his 
 wish. 
 
 A written order, or a verbal command to the centurion, put the body at 
 Toseph's disposal. 
 
 With the help of servants, and it may be of some soldiers, the cross was
 
 JUDAS — THE CEUCIFIXION. 719 
 
 quickly cut down or lifted from its socket and laid on the ground, tlie 
 cords round the limbs untied, and the nails drawn from the hands and feet. 
 An open bier sufficed to carry away the body to its destined resting-place. 
 
 Among the Jews the hopes of the future were closely connected with 
 the careful preservation of the body after death. Like the Egyptians, they 
 attached supreme importance to the inviolability of the tomb either by 
 time or violence, and no less to the checking of natural decay by embalm- 
 ing. To perpetuate their existence on earth, at least in the withered mock- 
 ery of the grave, and to lie in the Holy Land in the midst of their fathers, 
 has at all times been the most sacred wish of the Jews. In the days of 
 Jesus, however, an additional motive for burial in Palestine and a careful 
 preservation of the body, was found in the belief of the Resurrection, 
 which was to take place first in Judea, commencing in the valley under 
 the east of the Temple. Even now an Israelite always seeks to have some 
 of the soil of the Holy Land laid in his grave, that the spot Avhere he rests 
 may be counted part of the sacred ground ; if indeed his body has not, before 
 the Judgment, made its way through the land and sea to the home of his 
 fathers. The same feeling was all-powerful in the days of our Lord; for 
 in the great sieges of Jerusalem, many Jewish fugitives came back to the 
 city, in spite of the horrors they had already striven to escape, that they 
 might count on at least the last of all blessings, a burial in its holy bounds. 
 
 The neighbourhood of Jerusalem, like all other parts of Palestine, has 
 hence, since the earliest times, abounded in tombs hewn out in the lime- 
 stone rock. Princes, rich men, every one who could by any means secure 
 it, desired above all things to prejoare for themselves and their families an 
 " everlasting house," and such a tomb, never yet used, had Ijeen hewn out 
 in the hill-side for himself, by Joseph, in a garden not far from Calvary. 
 
 To this the body of Jesus was now taken. Nicodemus had come, with 
 some of his servants, and he and th^, with Joseph and his attendants 
 and Mary of Magdala, and Mary the mother of James the Less and of Joses, 
 the wife of Clopas, and perhaps some others of the true-hearted women 
 from Galilee, were the only followers of His bier. 
 
 Arrived at the grave, the sacred burden was laid down for a time, till 
 the needed preparations were made for placing it in the tomb. The whole 
 body, stained as it was with blood, Avas tenderly ^washed, and then wrapped 
 in broad bands of white linen, within which were thickly strewn powdered 
 myrrh and aloes, which had been provided by Nicodemus for the imperfect 
 embalmment practised by the Jews. The ends of the bandages were appa- 
 rently secured on the inner side with gum, as in the case of the Egyptian 
 dead. After a last kiss, the pledge of undying love, a white cloth was 
 finally laid over the face. The corpse was then placed in a niche in the 
 rock, and since there was no stone door as in some tombs, a great stone, 
 prepared for the jDurpose, was rolled against the entrance, to protect the 
 body from the designs of enemies or the attacks of wild beasts. It was only 
 a hurried burial, for the last rays of the sun were shining on the garden 
 as the stone was set up against the entrance to the grave. 
 
 Even then, however, there were some hearts that could not leave the 
 spot. Though He no longer spoke to them and they no longer saw Him,
 
 720 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 some of the Galilioaii fiiitlifiil ones, lingering beside His resting-place, sat 
 down on the earth, before the door of the tomb, as mourners. In the even- 
 ing stillness and gathering twilight they seemed even yet to hear His voice 
 and see His form, and so they lingered on, as near as miglit l)c into the 
 Sabbath eve, lamenting Him whom they had lost. 
 
 Meanwhile, the fears of the chief priests and their parly had already 
 awaked. A meeting had been held immediately after the crucifixion, and 
 the success of the scheme to crush Jesus had, doubtless, been the subject of 
 hearty mutual congratulations. But they dreaded that all was not over. 
 It was remembered by one or more that " the deceiver " had spoken darkly 
 of rising from the dead on the third day, and His disciples, acting on this 
 hint, might steal the body, and spread abroad the assertion that He had 
 actually risen, misleading the jieople more than ever, l)y claiming for Him 
 Divine honours. It was hence necessary that the grave should be watched 
 for three days. A deputation was therefore appointed to wait on Pilate, 
 representing their apprehensions. Tired of them, and hating them, the 
 governor was in no humour to argue. " Ye have a guard," said he with 
 military bluntness. " Go, make it as sure as ye can." This they did. Pass- 
 ing a strong cord across the stone, and securing its ends by clay, they 
 sealed it, after noting that the soldiers were duly stationed so as to make 
 approach without their knowledge impossible. 
 
 And thus the Redeemer was left, pale but victorious, to sleep through 
 the Sabbath. 
 
 CHAPTER LXIV. 
 
 THE llESURRECTIOX AND THE FORTY DAYS. 
 
 THE religion of the Letter had carried out to the bitter end its con- 
 flict with the religion of the Spirit. Incapable of reform, identi- 
 fying its dead rites with the essence of truth, it had crucified the Teacher 
 who had dared to say that they had served their day and lost their worth. 
 Ritualism had reached its natural culmination in claiming to be the whole 
 of religion, and had slain The Truth and The Life, when He witnessed 
 against it. 
 
 The benumbed and moribund Past had striven to perj^etuate itself, by 
 attempting to destroy the Kingdom of the Future in its cradle. How 
 utterly it failed, eighteen centuries have told us. 
 
 It was the old story ; the light had come into the darkness, and the 
 darkness would not have it ; accustomed to the one, it was only dazzled 
 and blinded by the other. Evil had had its apparent triumph. As far as 
 the will and hand of man could effect it, He who, alike as He was man 
 and also as the Messiah of Israel, knew no spot or blemish of sin, had 
 been crushed as an evil-doer. The one holy Being of our race, having 
 revealed Himself as the true Christ, expected for ages, the Hope of Israel, 
 the highest and perfect expression of the spirit and aim of the ancient 
 economy and even of all other religions, so far as they had Divine ele- 
 ments in them— had been rejected and dishonoured to the uttermost by
 
 TnE EESURRECTION AXD THE FOEIY DATS. 721 
 
 the rulers of the Peoijle of God, and by the great bulk of the nation. He 
 who had desired to secure the salvation of Israel, and through it, of 
 humanity, and had shown how alone that salvation could be attained, had 
 been branded by the highest authorities, both of Judaism and heathenism, 
 as a deceiver of the people. The blindness of the one and the indifference 
 of tlie other had united in atterajating to crush Him, whose only weapons 
 in the assault on evil had been the highest wisdom, the divincst love, and 
 unconquerable meekness. But their triumph was only a momentary and 
 permitted echpse of the Light of the "World, destined presently to reappear 
 in unveiled and henceforth unsetting glory. 
 
 " Nothing," says even so keen a critic as Heinrich Ewald, " stands 
 more historically certain than that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared 
 again to His followers, or than that their seeing Him thus again was the 
 beginning of a higher faith, and of all their Christian work in the world. 
 It is equally certain that they thus saw Him, not as a common man, or as 
 a shade or ghost risen from the grave ; but as the one Only Son of God — 
 already more than man, alike in nature and power ; and that all who thus 
 beheld Him, recognised at once and instinctively His unique Divine 
 dio-uitv, and fii-mlv believed in it thenceforth. The Twelve and others 
 had, indeed, learned to look on Him, even in life, as the True Messianic 
 King and the Son of God ; but; from the moment of His reappeaiing, 
 they recognised more clearly and full}- the Divine side of His nature, and 
 saw in Him the conqueror of death. Yet the two pictui-es of Him thus 
 fixed in theii" minds were in theii* essence identical. That former familiar 
 apiiearance of the earthly Christ, and this higher vision, with its depth of 
 emotion and ecstatic joy, were so inter-related that, even in the first days 
 or weeks after His death, they could never have seen in Him the 
 Heavenly Messiah, if they had not first known Him so well as the 
 earthly." 
 
 Mary of Magdala, and the wife of Clopas, herself another Mary — for 
 Mary, from the Hebrew Miriam, was a favoiuite name ever since the days 
 of the sister of Moses — had sat on the ground at the door of the garden- 
 tomb in which the Beloved One lay, till late on the evening of Friday. 
 The trumpet announcing the beginning of the great Passover Sabbath had 
 only startled them for a moment, and exhausted nature had, perhaps, first 
 compelled them to leave. 
 
 The next day rose calm and bright on the budding and blossoming 
 landscape, for it was Xisau, the month of flowering, and nature was in the 
 secret to be revealed on the morrow, and might well, for joy, put on her 
 fairest. The courts of the Temple were filled from morning till evening 
 with zealous worshippers ; the barefooted, white-robed, and turbaned 
 priests were busy offering the blood of bulls and of goats for the sins of 
 Israel, unconscious that the blood of a greater sacrifice had been shed, of 
 which those offered by them were only the rude, and well-nigh revolting 
 symbol. Yet it must have been with strange feelings they went through 
 the services of the day. The trumpets and voices of the Levites were 
 loud and clear as ever ; the high priest, fresh from Golgotha, as gorgeous 
 ID his splendid robes ; the crowd of priests as engrossed with official toil ; 
 
 3 A
 
 722 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 the throngs filling the courts below, not less numerous or devout. But an 
 omen, portentous beyond all their history recorded, had been seen by 
 Levite and priest alike— for was not the Holy of Holies, hitherto veiled in 
 awful darkness, and entered only once in the year, for a few moments, by 
 the high priest, laid visibly open before every one in the court of the 
 prieststor even in the vast Temple area? For the Holy of HoUes stood 
 high above the rest of the sanctuary. The huge, heavy veil of Baby- 
 lonian tapestry of fine flax, gorgeous in its hyacinth and scarlet and 
 purple, had been mysteriously rent from top to bottom, at the moment 
 when the "enemy of the Temple" expired on Calvary, and the awful 
 presence-chamber of Jehovah had been exposed to every eye, like ground 
 
 no longer sacred. 
 
 The disciples of Jesus, and even the Eleven, had been overwhelmed by 
 the events of the day. Having no clear idea of their Master's meaning, 
 and thinking little on words painful at best, His repeated warnings, that 
 He must be°put to death, but would rise again from the dead on the third 
 day, had made no lasting impression on their minds. The catastrophe 
 had been so sudden and complete, that, for the time, they were confounded 
 and paralyzed. 
 
 It is the glory of woman that she refuses to forsake those she loves, 
 even when things are darkest. The two Marys had left the grave only 
 when the deep night compelled them, but even then they still had its 
 dear One in their hearts. The Sabbath, which had begun just as the 
 stone was rolled to the entrance, kept them from doing anything for Him 
 for twenty-four hours, but it was no sooner over, on Saturday at sunset, 
 than with Salome, and Joanna, and some other women, they arranged to 
 take additional spices at the earliest dawn to complete the embalming of 
 the body, begun by Nicoderaus, but left unfinished through the approach 
 of the Sal^bath. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was too sorely stricken in 
 heart to join them. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Eoman sentries were pacing to and fro on their beat, 
 before the sepulchre, their fire lighted, for the spring night was chilly, 
 and besides, the light revealed any one approaching. The true-hearted 
 women had resolved to reach the grave by sunrise, which would take 
 place about a quarter before six in the morning, and slept outside the city, 
 gates, which did not open till daybreak at the earliest. The grey dawn 
 had hardly shown itself, before they were afoot on their errand, to per- 
 form the last offices of love. As they went, however, a difficulty rose of 
 which they had not thought before. Who would roll back the stone for 
 them, from the door of the sepulchre? They had heard nothing, ap- 
 parently, of its having been sealed, or of the guard being mounted m the 
 garden, else they might have been altogether discouraged. But we may 
 be sure they had told some of the Eleven where the grave lay, and might 
 hope that one, at least, would be there to help them. 
 
 A greater than an Apostle had already, however, been at the tomb. 
 For St. Matthew tells us, "an angel of the Lord had descended from 
 heaven, his countenance shining like lightning, and his raiment white as 
 Buow, and," striking terror even into the Eoman guard, " had rolled back
 
 THE EESUEEECTION AND THE FOETY DAYS. 723 
 
 tlie stone from the door." As it opened, the Crucified One had come 
 forth, unseen by the dazzled soldiers, and had presently vanished. 
 
 They had scarcely left the si3ot, when the ■women arrived. The earth 
 was trembling strangely, but they had kept on their way. How great 
 must have been their astonishment, however, when they found the stone 
 rolled back, and the grave ojsen. There was no longer a guard, for the 
 soldiers had fled in terror at the angelic vision. Mary of Magdala entered 
 the garden first, and found things thus, and having run back to the others 
 hastened into the city to tell Peter and John. Determined to solve the 
 mystery, if possible, her companions came together to the sepulchre, and, 
 bending down, entered its inner chamber. But it was only to be appalled 
 by the sight of an angel in white, sitting in it, as if waiting to bear the 
 glad news to them of what had taken place. Presently, a second radiant 
 form stood before them, as they bowed down their faces to the earth in 
 terror. But words now fell on their ears which brought back joy to their 
 hearts. " Fear not, for I know that ye seek Jesus of Nazareth who was 
 crucified. Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, for 
 He is risen. Behold the place where they laid Him. But go c^uicklj^, tell 
 His disciples, and Peter, that He is risen from the dead. Eemember the 
 words that He said to you while He was yet in Galilee— that the Son of Man 
 must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucifi.ed, and the 
 third day rise again. And tell them ' He goeth before you into Galilee,' 
 there you will see Him, as He said unto you. Lo, I have told you." 
 
 Mary of Magdala had hurried back to Jerusalem with eager steps, to 
 tell the strange fact of the grave being empty to Peter and John, who seem 
 to have lived together at this time. The Virgin Mother, now John's 
 honoured guest, hearing the amazing news, joined the other Mary in 
 urging the two Apostles to go immediately to the tomb, though their own 
 faithful hearts at once instinctively impelled both forthwith to do so. 
 Peter and John, therefore, were instantly on the way to the garden ; their 
 eager haste hurrying them to the utmost sjaeed. John, however, younger 
 than Peter, outran him, yet contented himself, on reaching the tomb, with 
 stooping down and gazing into its empty space. The body assuredly was 
 gone, but there was no trace of violence, for the linen bandages lay 
 carefully unrolled, in the empty niche where the Saviour had been placed. 
 Natural reverence and the awful mystery before him kept him from 
 actually entering ; but no such hesitation checked the impulsive Peter. 
 Passing under the low doorway, he went in, undismayed. The sepulchre 
 was, indeed, empty, as John and the women had found ; only the grave- 
 linen was left — the bands for the body and limbs laid by themselves, and 
 the cloth that had covei'ed the face of the Dead, not Ij'ing with them, but 
 folded up in a place by itself. Following his friend, John now entered, 
 and saw that it was so. The great truth, as he himself tells us in long 
 after years, now for the first time flashed on his mind, that Jesus had 
 risen. Neither he nor the other Apostles had, as yet, realized that it had 
 been foretold in the Scriptures that He would do so ; for this would have 
 explained the whole at once, and would have thrown light on the hitherto 
 mj'sterious words of Jesus Himself respecting His resurrection.
 
 724 THE LIFE OF CimiST. 
 
 Having seen for themselves the empty tomb, they thought, like men, 
 only of going back, to discuss with each other and with their brethren 
 what it could mean. But the women would not leave the spot. Wander- 
 ing everywhere, they only cared to find Him whom they loved, if they 
 conld ; for they fancied that the body had been removed to some other 
 place. Mary of Magdala had meanwhile returned, and stood weeping at 
 tlie door of the tomb ; her spirit, like that of her companions, overborne 
 with longing anxiety to find Him, if possible, and refusing to believe that 
 she could not. The two Ai)Ostles had seen no angels, bnt the weeping 
 woman was more highly favoured. Gazing into the sepulchre, the empty 
 space where Jesus had lain was no longer untenanted, but, instead of the 
 Eedeemer, she saw two angels, in bright robes, one where the head and the 
 other where the feet had rested. They were there to comfort the broken 
 heart, as, indeed, they had, doubtless, been before, though for the time 
 they remained unseen. 
 
 "Woman," said one, in a human voice that disarmed fear, " why weepest 
 thou ? " 
 
 " Because," replied Mary, in broken accents, " they have taken away my 
 Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him." 
 
 As she said this, she turned and drew back into the open garden, hardly 
 knowing what she did. A man now stood before her, with the simple 
 dress of the humbler classes, and being in a garden, she naturally tliQUght 
 him the person in charge of it. " Woman," said he strangely enough, as it 
 must have seemed to Mary, in the same words as the angels had used, 
 " why weepest thou ? whom seekest thou ? " " Sir," said Mary, taking it 
 for granted, as great sorrow does, that the cause of her grief must be 
 known to all, " if thou hast carried him from this tomb, pray tell me where 
 thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away." She was a woman of 
 means, and would see that He had a final and suitable resting-place. 
 
 No reply was given, except the repetition of her own name — " Mary.' 
 But the voice revealed the speaker. It was that of Jesus. She had not 
 recognised the known, but now strangely etherealized, features, — the one 
 " spiritual body " ever seen by human eyes — the corruptible changed into 
 incorruption, the mortal into immortality. But the sound of that voice, 
 so tenderly remembered, brought with it full recognition of the face and 
 form. 
 
 " Eabboni," said she, in the country tongue they both loved so well, 
 " My Teacher ! " and was about to fall on His neck in uncontrollable 
 emotion. 
 
 " Touch me not," said He, drawing back, " for I have not yet ascended 
 to the Father ; but go to my brethren, and say to them, I ascend to my 
 Father and your Father, and to my God and your God." 
 
 Meanwhile, the other women had come near, and hearino; and seeing 
 what had passed, kneeled in lowly worship. As they advanced, Jesus 
 greeted them with the salutation they had often heard from His lips, " All 
 hail ! " and the words, and the sight of Mary adoring Him, left them no 
 question of its being their Lord. He had withheld Mary from any ap- 
 proach to the tender freedom of former days, but He now stood still while
 
 THE ELSURTvECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 725 
 
 the lowly band, Mary among them, held Him by the feet, and paid Him 
 lowliest reverence. Then, as they kneeled, came the words, grateful to 
 their hearts, " Be not afraid ! Go, tell my brethren to go into Galilee, and 
 they will see me there." 
 
 So saying, He was gone. 
 
 Losing no time, Mary oE Magdala and the others hnrried back to Jern- 
 salem, and found that, in the still early morning the news had spread to 
 all the Eleven, that their Master was alive and had been seen both Ijy her 
 and by them. But it seemed too wonderful for simple minds to realize at 
 once, and sounded only like an idle tale which they could not believe. It 
 sufficed, however, to rally them, for the first time since Gethsemane ; for 
 that very night they once more assembled as of old. 
 
 No detailed narrative of the successive appearances of Jesus to His 
 disciples, after His resurrection, has been left us, each narrative giving 
 only special cases, which had particularly impressed the mind of the 
 writer. It is evident, indeed, that He showed Himself on many occasions 
 of which no record is preserved ; for St. John expressly tells us, in his 
 summary of the Forty Days, that besides the sign in the case of Thomas, 
 Jesus did many others before His disciples, which are not written in the 
 Gospel bearing the Apostle's name, and He had promised that He would 
 manifest Himself again, soon after His death, to those who continued 
 faithful to Him. Had we a full narrative of the interval between the 
 Resurrection and the Ascension, it would doubtless illustrate more vividly 
 than existing records permit, the fulness and variety of demonstration 
 which alone accoimts for the firra and triumphant proclamation of Christ's 
 victory over death, by the Apostles and early Church. 
 
 One characteristic is common to all the appearances recounted : they 
 never pass outside the purely spiritual bounds we instinctively associate 
 with the mysterious existence on which Jesus had entered. Even when 
 most closely touching the material and earthly. He is always seen speaking 
 and acting only as a spirit, coming suddenly, revealing Himself in an 
 imperceptibly increasing completeness, which culminates at last in some 
 unmistakable sign, and presently vanishing as siiddenly as He appeared. 
 He no longer acts or suffers as before His death, and even when conde- 
 scending most to the seen and material, only does so to prove Himself, 
 beyond question, tlie same Jesus as formerly, who in common human life 
 shared all the experiences and wants of His followers. To some He made 
 Himself known, as to Mary and the women, by a single word or by brief 
 sentences, the voice carrying instant conviction with it ; to others, in a 
 lengthened communion, as with the disciples going to Bmmaus, kindling 
 their soul by the higher sense He gave to the Scriptures, and by a repeti- 
 tion of the symbolic " breaking of bread," which, on the last night. He 
 had enjoined on the Eleven ; to others again, as to Thomas, by an outward 
 material proof from the wounds on His person ; and, to still others, by 
 joining them in their simj^le repast, as with the disciples on the shore of 
 the Lake of Galilee. 
 
 It would seem, from a notice by St. Paul, that the first appearance, after 
 that granted to the women, was vouchsafed to Peter, perhaps while still in
 
 726 THE LIFE OF CUEIST. 
 
 the garden. The completeness of the Apostle's repentance had secured as 
 complete a forgiveness, and Jesus could not forget that Peter's home at 
 Capernaum had been Ilis, or how true-hearted he had been from the very 
 days of the Baptism on the Jordan, though he had failed for a moment 
 when off his guard. The look of reproach, mingled with love and pitj^ 
 had melted Peter's heart while the denials were yet on his lips, and now, 
 the look and tender words of the risen Christ bound him to Him for ever. 
 He had been the foremost in zeal for the meek and lowlj^ Master while still 
 rejected and despised ; but when that Master stood before him, the con- 
 queror of death and the glorified Son of God, his zeal rose to a passionate 
 devotion that, henceforth, knew no abatement. 
 
 The news of the Resurrection spread fast among the disciples in Jeru- 
 salem ; still it required time to reach all, and even when announced, the 
 fact was too great to be realized at once, and too contrary to previous ex- 
 pectations to be other than slowly understood. Deep dejection reigned 
 throughout the little Christian company. In spite of all their Master's 
 warnings. His death had come on them by surprise, and, as it seemed, had 
 destroyed everything. Cut off suddenly from all the hopes they had 
 cherished of an earthly kingdom, notwithstanding the constant lessons of 
 Christ's life and words, and deeply distressed by the loss of their Teacher 
 and Head, they appeared to be left helpless and paralyzed. The horrors 
 of the past few days engrossed their thoughts and conversation. They 
 believed Him now in Paradise, but no one dreamed of a resurrection so 
 soon. John had, indeed, risen in some measure to the grandeur of the 
 truth, and Peter had even seen Him ; but the bulk of the disciples had 
 well-nigh lost all hope. The report of tlie empty grave, and of the vision 
 of angels and of their announcement that He was alive, was insufficient 
 to break their gloom, and prolonged their perplexity without relieving it. 
 
 Midday had passed, and only floating rumours were as yet abroad. The 
 disciples began to think of finally separating, and returning to their homes; 
 for without their Master, they were without a leader. Two of them de- 
 termined to go back to Emmaus, a village between seven and eight miles 
 north-west of Jerusalem, on the high slope of the hills. The way to it 
 was over hills and through valleys, more and more barren as Jerusalem 
 was left behind, but Emmaus itself looked down into a hollow through 
 which a rivulet spread greenness and beauty. Vines and olive-trees, 
 planted in terraces up the hill-side, and the white and red flowers of the 
 almond-tree, now bursting into blossom in the valley, made the end of the 
 journey a pleasant contrast to its beginning. 
 
 The two travellers were not from among the Apostles, and it is not even 
 known whether they had been in the nuinber of the Seventy. The name 
 of the one is told us, Cleopas, a different word from Clopas, the name of 
 the husband of one of the Marys who waited on Christ, and thus, no hint 
 is furnished by it. The other has been variously fancied as Nathanael, 
 Peter, or, even Luke himself, but it is only conjecture. They were passing 
 on their way, their conversation turning naturally on that of which their 
 hearts were full, and of which they had heard and spoken so much that 
 day. AVas Jesus the Messiah or not.^ K so, how had things ended so
 
 THE EESUIIRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 727 
 
 gloomily ? His life, His words, His miracles, seemed to sliow that He was 
 the Messiah; but, on the other hand, how could the Messiah have been 
 crucified ? 
 
 Meanwhile, a stranger, going their way, oyertook them, and, very pos- 
 sibly to their disappointment, joined them. He had heard how eagerly 
 they were disputing and reasoning, so that it seemed only natural when 
 He asked them what subject had so engrossed them. Half impatient that 
 He should seem unacquainted with a matter so supreme to themselves, 
 Cleopas answered, " Tliat he could not have thought any one who had been 
 to the feast in Jerusalem, would ask the subject of their conversation, 
 when such great things, still in every one's mouth, had happened in these 
 last few days." 
 
 " What things ? " asked the stranger. 
 
 " AVhat but respecting Jesus of Nazareth ? " replied Cleopas. " He was 
 a prophet of God, a mighty worker of miracles, and a grout teacher. All 
 the people must own that He was that. Do you not know about Him ? 
 How our priests and Rabbis seized Him, and condemned Him to death, 
 and forced Pilate to crucify Him ? Yet we believed, as it seemed on the 
 best grounds, that He was the Messiah, who should have delivered Israel. 
 But it is now the third day since all this has happened. Some of the 
 women belonging to our company, however, have created no little per- 
 plexity amongst us. They had gone early in the morning to the tomb, 
 but found it empty, and came back, saying that angels had appeared to 
 them, who told them that He was alive again. On this some of our num- 
 ber went to the sepulchre, and found the facts as the women represented, 
 but they did not see Jesus Himself." 
 
 It was clear that the spark of hope kindled by the first report had been 
 already extinguished. 
 
 The stranger had listened attentively, and now, to their surprise, began . 
 to chide them for their doubt, and entered into the matter that so engrossed j 
 them, with the earnestness of one who felt as supremely interested in their ■ 
 Master's cause as they were themselves, and with an intelligence that 
 arrested their closest attention. 
 
 " What is there in all this that makes you so dejected and despairing? " 
 asked He. " ye dull of understanding, and sluggish of heart ! Why 
 not grasp more clearly, and believe more readily, what is the burden of all 
 the prophets ? Had you been as intelligent, and as ready in your hearts 
 as you should have been, to understand and accept the witness of Scrip- 
 ture, you would have seen that it had been prophesied, from the first, that 
 the Messiah was to suffer and die, as Jesus has done. Let us examine 
 whether the prophets do not show that the Christ — the Messiah — mvast 
 needs have been thus lowly, entering into His glory only after suffering 
 death, though you have foolishly imagined His Kingdom was to come by 
 force and miracle." 
 
 The stranger was evidently at least a learned Rabbi; and had won their 
 anxious, respectful attention already, by the novelty and force of his appeal. 
 But now, as he journeyed on at their side, their wonder and delight in- 
 creased, for he quoted passage after passage, from the beginning to the
 
 728 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 end of the Scriptures, and showed them how the whole si)irit and contents 
 of the Holy Books pointed to snch a Messiah as he had indicated— a 
 Messiah founding a spiritual, not a mere earthly kingdom, by love and 
 self-sacrifice, not by force. They had never heard such discourse. He 
 threw light on the deep things of Scripture, which made it a new book to 
 them. They had been familiar with it from childhood, but now, for the 
 first time, found that their Master, alike in His life and death, shone out 
 from every page. 
 
 Such discourse shortened the road, and found them still eagerly listen- 
 ing as they approached Emmaus, the end of the journey. Climbing the 
 hill path together, through the terraces of vines and olives, and passing 
 under the village gate, they were presently at the house where the disciples 
 Averc to stay. And, now, the stranger bade them adieu. What they had 
 heard from him, however, had interested them so much, that they longed 
 to hear more. They begged him, therefore, to lodge wnth them for the 
 night, and this, the rather, as the day was far spent. Accepting the invi- 
 tation, all thi'ee went into the house. 
 
 It must have been no small Avonder to the Two, who their mysterious 
 companion could be. Nothing in His dress or speech gave them a clue, 
 and they did not know His features. But a feeling of reverence kept them 
 from asking. 
 
 Simple refreshments were presently set before them — among the rest, 
 bread and wine. The stranger, as was his due, had the place of honour at 
 table, aud it fell to him to hand what was before them, to the others. 
 Only the three were together. 
 
 Soon after, the UnknoAvn, taking the bread, offered the usual benedic- 
 tion, just as Jesus had done ; broke the bread, just as Jesus had broken 
 it; handed it to them, just as Jesus had handed it. Bearing, voice, and 
 manner were His. And now, as they look at Him more closely, the veil 
 He had assumed passes away, and the very Face and Form also were His. 
 
 It was He ! Meanwhile, as they gazed in awful Avonder and reverence, 
 He vanished. 
 
 No instance given illustrates more strikingly the adaptation of the 
 Eisen Saviour's self-disclosures to the requirements of His disciples. 
 Their minds w^ere first enlightened and their hearts Avarmed, till there 
 was no longer a danger of affecting their senses only, but a security of 
 intelligent conviction, resting on impressions left by the discourse they 
 had heard. They Avere gently led on till fully prepared, and then the 
 APPEAEANCE was granted in a AA'ay so inexpressibly touching and tender, 
 that it no less fired their loA^e than cstal^lished their faith. 
 
 Left to themselves, the Tavo could speak only of Avhat they had heard 
 and seen — of Iioav their hearts had glowed in their bosoms as He talked 
 with them along the road, and opened to them the Scriptures. Their 
 ecstatic joy at having seen Him, Avhom they had known as the earthly 
 Messiah, now unveiled to them as the Messiah risen and glorified, the 
 conqueror of death, can only be faintly imagined. Neither life nor death 
 could ever efface the memory of it from their inmost hearts. But their 
 brethren must know the great truth. Hastening back to Jerusalem Avith
 
 THE "RESUREECTION AND THE FORTY DATS. 729 
 
 quickened steps, to reach it before the shutting of the gates, they found 
 the Eleven and a number of the disciples gathered together — the amazing 
 rumours of the day the one engrossing theme of discussion. Peter, it 
 seemed, had told them that Jesus had appeared to him, and now the Two 
 added their wondrous narrative. It was a thing so transcendent, however, 
 and so unheard of, that any one should rise fi*om the dead, that the com- 
 pany still fancied the women, and Peter, and the Two, under some strange 
 delusion. They could not credit their story as a matter of fact. 
 
 It was still Sunday, and the assembled Eleven, with the others, had 
 gathered at the table couches, to eat a simple evening meal together, 
 before parting for the night. The doors were fast closed, for fear of any 
 emissary of the high priest and Eabbis discovering them, as they were 
 discussing the strange reports they had heard, and justifying their 
 incredulity. Suddenly, through the closed doors, a Form ajipeared in 
 their midst, which they at once recognised as that of Jesus. Presently, 
 the salutation they had heard so often, sounded from His lips— the common 
 Jewish greeting, " Shalom Lacliem " — *• Peace to you ! " 
 
 The sight terrified and alarmed them. They could not realize that it 
 was really Jesus Himself, but fancied it was His spirit. 
 
 " Why are you in such fear," said He, '• and why do you not, at once, 
 without any such doubts and questionings in your minds, recognise me as 
 Him whom I really am ? " His hands were, of course, exposed beneatli 
 the sleeves of His abba, and His feet could be seen through His sandal- 
 straps. Holding up the former, and showing the marks of the great iron 
 nails of the cross in the palms, and pressing back His abba, and disclosing 
 the wounds on His feet, He went on : " Look at my hands and my feet. 
 see the wounds of the nails, and be satisfied that it is I, Jesus, myself, who 
 speak. And, that you may know that it is not my spirit you see, but the 
 same Master you knew of old, come near and touch me, for a spirit has 
 not flesh and bones as you see me have." 
 
 Evidence so convincing could leave no doubt, except from very joy at 
 its completeness ; for the return of their Lord, thus triumphant over the 
 grave, was so stupendous a miracle that while they could not question it, 
 their gladness would scarcely let them think it real. But still further 
 proof was to be given. Knowing how easily the idea might spread that 
 His appearances were merely those of a disembodied spirit, He asked 
 them to let Him share their meal. They had broiled fish, and having set 
 some before Him with wondering awe, He ate it in their sight. All doubt 
 now fled ; it was, indeed, their Risen Lord. 
 
 "Xow that you are convinced that it is really I," continued Jesus, "let 
 me remind you that the facts you have now verified — that I should die 
 and rise again from the dead — are the fulfilment of what I said to you 
 while I was yet with you, that all that was written respecting me in the 
 Scriptures, must be fulfilled in this way." 
 
 As the " Light of the AVorld," He then proceeded to recall to their 
 minds and explain more fullj" the prophecies respecting Himself in tiie 
 Books of !Moscs, the Prophets, and tlie Psalms — the three divisions under 
 which all the Holy Books were classed l)y the Jews; and showed their
 
 730 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 wonderful vividness as inspired anticipations of what had really happened 
 in His own person. 
 
 " You see thus," added He, after giving this summary of the testimony 
 of Scripture, "that it was necessarj^ in the Divine counsels, that instead 
 of founding an earthly kingdom, as you expected, the Messiah should 
 suffer as I have done, and that He should rise from the dead the third 
 day, as ye see has been the case with me. The purposes of God now fur- 
 ther require that the need of repentance, ai^d the promise of the remission 
 of sins to be obtained through my death and resurrection, should be 
 preached, henceforth, as the great end of all I have suffered, and the 
 Salvation I was sent as the Messiah to secure, not for Israel only, but for 
 all mankind. These truths you are to proclaim to all nations, but you are 
 to begin at Jerusalem, that Israel may have still another opportunity of 
 accej^ting me, and of being saved through my name, now I am risen and 
 glorified, though they rejected me in my humiliation. And you, my 
 disciples, are the witnesses through whom God will spread abroad this 
 message of mercy to Jews and heathen, and proclaim His new Heavenly 
 Kingdom founded by me." 
 
 The Avondering disciples now saw that He was about to leave them once 
 more. As He prepared to do so, however, He added: — 
 
 "Peace be with you! As my Father sent mc, so I send you. Go ye 
 into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. Ho who 
 believes and is ba2:)tized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be 
 condemned. And these miraculous signs will be granted those who 
 believe, for a confirmation of their faith, and that they may win others. 
 They will cast out devils in my name ; they will speak with tongues new 
 to them ; they will take up serpents without harm to themselves ; if they 
 drink any deadly thing it will not hurt them ; and they will lay hands on 
 the sick, and they will recover. 
 
 " To fit you for your great work I shall presently send you the Helper 
 promised by my Father, but stay in the city till you are clothed with this 
 power from on high." 
 
 There were only ten of the Eleven present, for Thomas was absent, but 
 these He now gathered before Him. As an earnest of the fuller endow- 
 ment, hereafter, He was about to impart to them a special consecration by 
 the Holy Spirit, to their office as Apostles. He had, Himself, compared 
 the influence and entrance of the Spirit to the breathing of the wind, and 
 now, prefacing His intended words by the symbolical act of breathing on 
 the Ten, He said : 
 
 " Eeceive ye the Holy Spirit. The government of the Church is com- 
 mitted to your charge. As a special gift for your work as founders of my 
 Kingdom, Divine insight is granted you to ' discern the spirits ' of men, 
 that so you may know their true state before God. Through you, there- 
 fore, henceforth, as through me till now, He will announce the forgiveness 
 of sins, and it will be granted by God to those to whom you declare it. 
 Through you, moreover. He will make known to others that their sins are 
 not forgiven, and to him to whom you are constrained to sjicak thus, to 
 him his sins will not be forgiven by God till you announce their being so."
 
 THE EESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DAYS. 731 
 
 Having said tliis, He vanished from their sight. 
 
 It is impossible to realize the emotions of the little band of Apostles 
 and disciples at these appearances. They knew that Jesus had been put 
 to death ; they had fancied themselves permanently deprived of His 
 presence and help, and they had not known what to think respecting Him. 
 But when He stood amidst them, once moi'e, after He had risen, a sudden 
 and strange revolution took place in their minds. They saw before them 
 Him whom they had revered as the Messiah while clothed in hiiman weak- 
 ness, now raised to an unimaginable glory which at once confirmed and 
 sublimed their former faith. They saw Him victorious over the grave, 
 and clothed with the attributes of the eternal world. In a moment, the 
 whole sweep of the truth respecting Him, hitherto only half realized, had 
 become a radiant fact, even to their senses. The hesitating and imperfect 
 belief in His heavenly dignity and power to fulfil all He had promised, 
 here and hereafter, which had slowly rooted itself iu their hearts while He 
 still lived, had seemed, after all, from the catastrophe of these last 
 disastrous three days, a fond and beautiful delusion. But now at length, 
 as He appeared among them, triumphant even, over death, it broke all 
 restraints and flooded theu- whole soul with sacred light as never before, 
 for the revulsion from despondency to the purest and holiest joy gave it 
 additional strength. 
 
 It is impossible to conceive the effect of such sights of their Eisen 
 ]\raster, on the minds of those who were thus favoured with them. The 
 whole life of one who had seen Him and stood near Him, perhaps touched 
 Him, after He had risen, became a long dream of wonder. Such an one 
 felt, henceforth, even in the midst of his commonest occupations, as if 
 Christ were still, though unseen, beside him ; he saw Him, as it were, 
 radiant before his eyes ; he seemed still to hear His words of infinite love, 
 and lived in habitual communion with Him, as with One, hidden it might 
 be, for the moment, iu the upper light, but to be expected as a visible form 
 at any instant. We see this in every page of the Gospels and the Epistles. 
 
 Only the immeasurable force of the thought that the Son of God Him- 
 self, the true glorified Messiah, had appeared to them ; not, as hitherto, in 
 the veil of the flesh, but in a heavenly transfiguration, victorious over 
 death ; that He had stood among them, had quickened, and inspired them, 
 perhaps had let Himself even be reverently touched — could have created 
 such effects. Henceforth, he only was recognised as an Apostle in the 
 fullest sense, who had seen Him in His spiritual body during this mys- 
 terious interval, when He seemed ready to soar to heaven as His riglitfnl 
 home, and, though still on earth, was no longer of it. Nothing could be 
 more amazing than the result of such a sight of Him, thus glorified, on 
 the Apostles. From despair they passed at once to triumphant confidence; 
 from incapacity to believe that the Messiah could have suffered as He had 
 done, to the most fervent and exulting faith in Him as the Messiah, on 
 account of these very sufferings. They became, suddenly, men into whom 
 the very spirit of Christ seemed to have passed ; their spiritual nature 
 had been wholly changed, and they were bound to Him, hcnccfortb, with a 
 deathless and ecstatic devotion.
 
 732 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 Tlie appeax'ances Touclisafed during the day of the Ke^urroction bad 
 now ended. On the part of the priests and Eabbis there had been p;reat 
 anxiety, for they, as vrell as the discijiles. liad early heard the riunonrs 
 of His having risen. Some of the ■watch, after having fled in terror 
 before the descending angel, had come into the city, and reported what 
 had happened. A hasty meeting of the chief men of the party had 
 been held, and the whole matter laid before them. Their perplexity was 
 extreme, but at last their Sadducee leaders invented a specious story. 
 Kot believing in angels, they affected to think that the soldiers had 
 been frightened away by some clever trick of the disci]des, who had 
 thus got possession of the body of their Master. There were, indeed, 
 difficulties in the way of spreading such a story, but it would be fatal if 
 the rumour spread that angels had appeared. The peojde would naturally 
 think it a proof that Jesus had been what He said He was. and they would 
 turn to Him with more ardour than ever. The guard were therefore in- 
 structed, with the inducement of large bribes, to say that they had fallen 
 asleep, and foimd the body stolen when they woke. The hierarchy were 
 aware that it was death for a sentry to sleep at his post ; but removed 
 this difficulty by the promise that, in case the story reached the ears of 
 Pilate, they would explain that it was only an invention, to keep the people 
 quiet. 
 
 A whole week elapsed before the next manifestation recorded. On 
 Sunday — known, henceforth, as the " first day of the week," in contrast to 
 the Jewish Sabbath, the seventh day ; and as, especially, the " Lord's Day " 
 —the Eleven, having once more assembled, as they had done daily through 
 the week and continued to do, Jesus, honouring His resiu-rection day, once 
 more stood in the midst of them. Thomas, known as Didymus, or The 
 Twin, had not been present on the Sunday before, and in his gi'ave, earnest 
 way, refused to believe that Jesus had risen and appeared to the Ten, with- 
 out what he himself deemed indisputable proof. " Except I see in His 
 hands the prints of the nails," said he, "aud put my finger into them, and 
 put my hand into His side, where the spear-thrust made the gash, I will 
 not believe." Xo one could desire more to see his Master again, but his 
 temperament demanded what he thought demonstration of so amazing a 
 fact as the rising of one from the grave. 
 
 On this first Lord's day after the Eesurrection, however, his doubts were 
 for ever dispelled. The disciples had gathered in their common room, 
 which held at loast a hundred and twenty. The doors, as before, had been 
 carefully closed, for fear of spies from the Temple, and the approaches 
 were, doubtless, vigilantly watched. Suddenly, however, the words 
 " Peace to jon" were heard in the midst of the company, and looking up 
 Jesus stood before them. He had not been near, so far as the senses could 
 perceive, when Thomas had uttered his doubts, but He knew them none 
 the less. Turning to the faithful but still incredulous one, whose presence 
 there showed how eagerly he wished to believe the transcendent news, 
 Jesus, to his amazement, addressed him : 
 
 "Thomas, thou saidst thou wouldst not believe, unless thou couldst put 
 thy finger in the wounds of my hands, and feet, and side. Eeach hither
 
 THE EESUBBECTION AND THE FOETY DAYS. 733 
 
 thy finger — here arc my hands ; and react hither thy hand, and put it 
 into rny side, and >>e not faithless, but believing." 
 
 To hear his own words thus repeated by One who had not been present 
 when they were spoken ; to see the hands, and feet, and --ide ; to receive 
 duch condescension from One who he now felt was, indeed, his loved 
 Master, yet no longer a mortal man but the Lord of Life, the glorified 
 Messiah who had triumphed over death, overwhelmed him with awe. Xo 
 words could express his emotion. He could only utter Ms one deepest 
 thought, that he had before him his Lord and his God. 
 
 " lliomas," said Jesus, " thou hast believed at last because thou hast 
 seen me ; blessed are they who, without having seen me, believe, as thou 
 now dost, ttiat I have risen from the dead." 
 
 Hitherto, the Eisen Saviour, in all His appearances, so far as they are 
 recorded, had designed to prove to His disciples that He was really alive 
 again. Convinced of this, there was much to say to them of " the things 
 pertaining to the kingdom of God," which they were to spread abroad 
 through the earth. Before His death, He had told them that He had 
 many things to say to them, which were, as yet, too hard for them lo under- 
 .stand or receive. These He had now to communicate ; for what would 
 have been incomprehensible before His sufferings and Resurrection, was 
 dark no longer, when seen in the strong light of the cross and the empty 
 grave. 
 
 He did not, however, mingle among them and live in their midst, as of 
 old. They apparently expected that now He was alive again on earth. He 
 would once more gather them round Him, and stay permanently with them, 
 and they even fancied, that surely now at last He would set about the 
 establishment of the earthly kingdom of Israel, to which they so fondly 
 clung. But to have stayed thus familiarly with them, was no longer in 
 keeping with His glorified immortality. Till they too had put on incor- 
 ruption. He was separated from them by the infinite distance and differ- 
 ence of time and eternity. They belonged to the former. He now to the 
 latter. 
 
 He showed Himself, therefore, to them in such a way that they could 
 never coimt on His taking up His abode with them again, as in former 
 days ; accustoming them, thus, gradually to His absence, as in no measure 
 breaking or weakening their connection with Him. He hence vouchsafed 
 them only intermitted appearances ; that, on the one hand, they might be 
 in no doubt of His really having risen from the dead; and, on the other, 
 that they might become familiar with the idea of His leaving them. He 
 revealed Himself as One about to quit the world, and as no longer belong- 
 ing to it, but delaying His departure for a time, for their good. His inter- 
 course with them was, thus, almost like that of the angels with their 
 fathers in the early ages, when they came to their tents, conversed with 
 them, and even ate and drank what was offered them, but presently left 
 again and disappeared, till some new occasion brought them back. 
 
 Hence we are no more told the place of His stay in these forty days, or 
 of His journeys, or other details, as otherwise we might have expected. 
 He appears only at intervals, and we have no trace whence He has come,
 
 734 THE LIFE OF CHRIST. 
 
 or whither He vanishes. He does not travel back with His disciples to 
 Galilee after the feast, as was usual, but only names a mountain on which 
 He will meet them. They never ask Him, as He is about to leave them, 
 whither He is going, or, when He comes, whence He has done so. His 
 whole bearing towards them was like that to Mary of Magdala — " Think 
 not that rny Resurrection restores me to you as the comiianion of your 
 daily life. Rejoice not over my reappearance as if I were to stay now, 
 abidingly, with you. I go to my Father and your Father, to my God and 
 yours." 
 
 He had told the women at the sepulchre, to say to His disciples that He 
 would meet them ou a particular mountain in Galilee, and He doubtless 
 repeated this to the company when in their midst. The most of them were 
 Galila3ans, and would return home after the feast week. Galilee had been, 
 moreover, the special scene of His labours, and of His success, and a 
 greater number could be gathered together there tlian in Judea. Jeru- 
 salem was not to be their scene of action as yet. They could not begin 
 their great Apostolic work while their Master was still on earth, and, 
 besides, they needed not only many counsels before He left them, but the 
 power which the Holy Spirit, who v^as not yet given, could impart. When 
 they returned, to attend the Feast of Pentecost, seven weeks after the 
 Resurrection, they would receive their full heavenly consecration. 
 
 The future was still unknown even to the Apostles, and hence, though 
 they held themselves at the command of their Lord, the interval before 
 He required their permanent service saAV them, once more, at their former 
 callings. They seem to have had no idea that this visit to their homes 
 would be the last they would ever make to them as such, or that, Avithin 
 a few weeks, they Avould remove to Jerusalem, to stay there for a time, and 
 then wander forth to all lands, and see their native country, rarely, or 
 never again. But the long attendance on their Master had prepared them 
 for finally leaving everything for Him, and had fitted them, unconsciously, 
 for the duties that lay before them. 
 
 Simon Peter, Thomas the Twin, Nathanael of Cana, John and James, 
 sons of Zebedce, and two whose names are not given, apparently because 
 they were not Apostles, had, among others, betaken themselves to the 
 well-known shores of the Lake of Galilee, and had quietly resumed the 
 humble occupation familiar to most of them— that of fishermen. They 
 had been out on the lake all night, but had caught nothing, and were 
 rowing dispiritedly to land in the early dawn, when they saw on the shore 
 a stranger, whom they could not recognise in the twilight as any one they 
 knew. It was nothing strange that a person shovild come to them as they 
 were landing, to buy their catch. The simple habits of the East, moreover, 
 made it common to sell even single fish, which were prepared and cooked 
 on the spot, in the open air, by the buyer. They thought nothing, there- 
 fore, of the stranger presently asking them, with a kindly familiarity not 
 unusual in antiquity in addressing the humbler classes, " Children, have 
 ye anything to cat? " as if wishing to buy for his morning meal. "Nothing 
 at all," cried the fishermen. 
 
 " If you cast your net once more on the I'ight sida of the boat, you will
 
 THE EESURRECTION AND THE FORTY DATS. 735 
 
 find fish," said the stranger; and they, thinking perhaps that he had 
 noticed a shoal they had overlooked, were only too glad to do so. But 
 now the net sank, overloaded, so that they could hardly draw it after 
 them as they rowed to land. 
 
 There was no further question who the stranger could be ; for what was 
 this incident but the repetition of a well-remembered miracle of their 
 Master, almost at the same spot ? " It is the Lord," whispered John to 
 Peter. The name was enough. They were only about a hundred yards 
 from land, but the ardent, impulsive Peter could not wait. He was stand- 
 ing, naked, in the boat, after having swum round with the net, to sweep 
 the waters, as is still the custom on the Lake of Tiberias; but he instantly 
 drew on his upper garment, and, jumping into the water, swam ashore, to 
 be the first to see if it really were his Master. The others, meanwhile, 
 were slowly pulling to the beach, and presently reached it. It had been 
 bare a moment before, but now, strangely enough, they saw a fire burning, 
 with some fish on it, and bread at hand, as if the stranger had intended 
 them for Himself. 
 
 " If you would like to eat with me," said He, " bring some of the fish 
 you have just caught." 
 
 Peter had not dared to speak, for the awe of his Lord's heavenly great- 
 ness, as One belonging now to a higher life, was on him. But he instantly 
 ran to the boat, dripping as he stood, and di-agged ashore the net, which 
 was found to have caught a hundred and fifty-three large fish, without 
 Ijeing rent. All were convinced that it was Jesus, but they were dumb 
 with amazement; and though they wished to ask, their fear, and their very 
 eyesight, which told them that it was no other than their Master, kept 
 them from doing so. 
 
 They had sat down on the white, dry beach, round the fire, at His 
 invitation, and He now, once more as of old, took His place as Head of 
 the little group. Taking first bread, and then the fish, He divided them, 
 just as He had done while He was with them, and, as He did so, Ilis face 
 and bearing were so exactly what they had been, that the fear produced 
 by the suddenness of His appearance, and the nudefincd difference in 
 Him which had struck them at first, soon abated. His every word was 
 now doubly weighty, and hence John gives us a more than usually circum- 
 stantial narrative of what followed. The meal being finished. He turned 
 to Peter, as if to show him by a further proof how entirely his shortcoming 
 had been forgiven, and the completeness of his restoration to his apostolate. 
 He commonly called him Peter, but now addressed him as He had done 
 three years before, when they first met, and only once since, when ho 
 made his grand confession of belief that his Master was the Messiah. 
 "Simon, son of Jonas," asked He, "carest thou for me more than my other 
 disciples ? " " Yes, Lord," answered Peter, " Thou knowest that I love 
 Thee." " Go and feed my little ones— my lambs," replied Jesus ; " for 
 love to me, care for the spiritual wants of all who know and love mc, as 
 a shepherd sees that his flock be duly fed." The same question, in the, 
 same words, was then repeated. "Yes, Lord," answered Peter, more' 
 eagerly than before, " Thou knowest that I lovo Thee." " Then, tend my
 
 COr! 
 
 736 THE LIFE Oli" CHRIST. 
 
 sheep," ropliod Joj;us. "Not only uourisli, but caro for tlu'iii, as coinmitloil 
 to tliv cliai-iie." A tliird time the saino quostiou was asked — " Siiium, sou 
 of Jonas, hnest thou luo ? " The tlireorohl rojiotitiou had soniethiuL;; iu it 
 tender and warnin;:;. It was not a reproof, yet it was iUtiujj; tliat the 
 disciple who, a few days before, had thrice denied Him, shouUl be niaik> to 
 think as often of his weakness. Peter felt it, and almost thoui^ht tliat 
 .Tesns doubted his trustworthiness. "Lord," said he, "Thou knowgst all 
 things; Thou knowest that I love Thee." "Then," replied Jesus, "feed 
 my sheep : the oversight of my flock is thine, to see that they are fed." 
 
 " Hear now," He continued, " what awaits you. A^'erlly, verily, I say to 
 you. Hitherto yoii have girded yourself and gone whither you pleased, and 
 you do so still ; but in your old age you will stretch forth your hands 
 helplessly, and will give yoursell' up to others, who will gird you with 
 chains, and lead you off where you would fain not go to the jilace of 
 judgment." An assurance of safety for the present, and a timely warning 
 of what the futiire would bring ! There was a brief pause, and then the 
 words, " Tollow me," summoned the Apostle onco more, as of old ; but 
 spoken this time by the risen and gloritied Saviour, it called him to follow 
 Him in a martyr's death, and then, to tlie glory beyond. 
 
 Peter, taking the last words literall)', fancied he was to follow his 
 Master as before, and as Jesus seemed now leaving them, had done so a 
 few paces, when, turning round, he saw John coming after him. Unwilling 
 to separate from one endeared by long companionship as a fellow-disciple, 
 he therefore ventured to ask, in hope that John, too, would be allowed to 
 come with them — "' Lord, what Avill this man do ? " But things were not 
 as in old days of common familiar communion. " If I should please that 
 he live till my return, why should you seek to know it ? " i'e})lied Jesus. 
 " From you I require that you follow me in the path iu which I have gone 
 before you." 
 
 St. Paul, about twent^'-five years after, mentions another appearance, 
 which was no doubt the same as is related more fully by St. Matthew. It 
 took place in a mountain, appointed for the purpose by Jesus Himself, as 
 a well-kno^Ti spot to all. Here a large number of disciples, including, as 
 we know, the Eleven, gathered at the time fixed. It was a moment of 
 supreme solemnity, for it was the close, so far as we know, of Christ's 
 ministry iu Galilee. A mountain had been chosen, alike for privacy and 
 because all who might come woald be able to see their Master. Over five 
 hundred were gathered when Jesus appeared in their midst; some of them 
 long since dead when Paul wrote, but the majority still alive. With 
 beautiful frankness, the Evangelist tells us that some, Avho probably had 
 not seen Him before, still doubted a miracle so stupendous, but they were 
 ?o few that he could say of the multitude, as a whole, that they worshipped 
 Jesus as their Lord. 
 
 Before this numerous assemblage Jesus declared Himself, in the loftiest 
 sense, the Messiah. " All power," said He, " is given me in heaven and in 
 earth. As I have before commissioned my Apostles, so now I commission 
 you all, in the fulness of the authority thus given me, to go into the wliole 
 world, and annoance to all men that I live, and am exalted to be the Lord
 
 TJlii liE'SViUdECnOK AND THE FOItTY DAYS. 737 
 
 and the Meesiah. Go, gather disciples to me from among all nations, and 
 consecrate them by baptism, to faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Spirit, by whom God will speak and act through your means. Give them 
 the commands I have given you as my disciples, and urge that they keejj 
 them. Nor must you think yourselves alone while thus working in my 
 name, for lo, I am and shall be, with you always, till the end of the world." 
 As at the first, so now at the last, the wokd was the only weapon by which 
 His Kingdom was to be spread. Resting on peksl'asiox and cosvictio.n' 
 from the beginning, it was left on the same basis now He was about to 
 ascend to heaven. 
 
 Only two or perhaps three more appearances are recorded — one to James 
 alone, aiid one to all the Apostles. The last known meetings with the 
 Eleven took place immediately before the Ascension. It was the Parting 
 for Ever, so far aa outward and visible communion on earth was concerned 
 — the final delegation of the interests of His Kingdom to them, as His 
 chosen heralds and representatives. They were instructed to wait in 
 Jerusalem till the promise of the Father was fulfilled, that He would send 
 the Holy Spirit to them, as their Helper and Advocate, in place of their 
 departed Master — a promise which Jesus Himself had made known to 
 them. " For John," said He, "truly baptized with water, but the promise 
 which even he announced, that you would be baptized with the Holy Spirit, 
 will be fulfilled before many days." 
 
 'i'he Apostles, acquainted as they were with the Old Testament pro- 
 phecies, which foretold that the fulness of the Holy Spirit would be poured 
 out in the times of the Messiah, seem to have fancied that there was an 
 indirect promise of the establishment of the Messianic Kingdom, as they 
 conceived it, in these words. It appears as if an interval had elapsed — 
 apparently only a part of the same day — between the appearance at which 
 the renewed assurance of the bestowal of the Holy Spirit was given, and 
 that at which the question they were now to ask was put. When they 
 had come together again, Jesus once more stood among them, and then — 
 60 hard is it to uproot fixed preconceptions —they resolved to find out, if 
 possible, whether they had any grounds for their fond hopes. 
 
 " Lord," asked they, " wilt Thou at this time restore the fallen kingdom 
 of the Israelitish nation ? " They had not yet received the illumination 
 of the Spirit, which was to raise them at once and for ever above such 
 narrow and national views, and were still entangled in Jewish fancies, 
 which regarded the Messiah as sent to Israel, as such, for its earthly 
 glory as well as spiritual good. 
 
 Jesus would not answer such a question. There was much in their ex- 
 nectations which would never be realized ; yet the gift of the Spirit would 
 really be the true setting up of the Kingdom of the Messiah. Of its final 
 proclamation and full establishment, which would take place at His return 
 at the last day, He would say nothing. It lay hidden in the depths of the 
 future, and was of no advantage to them to know. " It is of no use to 
 you," said He, " to know the time or the circumstances of these great re- 
 volutions in the ages to come. The Father has kept these as a secret of 
 His own omniscience. Be it enough for you to know what will happen
 
 738 '1111': i.ii''i'; oi'" ciiijisr. 
 
 immcdi.'ili-ly on my ili>|i;iil nro. ^nii w ill icci'i\ c I 1h> jkiwcM's iif Mio Holy 
 Spiril in I'irli ini-!isiin>, iiiul inspiicd liy lln-sc. iiiiil |)r(-|iiircil l>y llicin in nil 
 poiulis. viMi will jA'o I'oiili iis wiUu-sscK for int<, nrul ol" my r(\^iirr(H't.i()ii, iiol, 
 (inly 1(1 .l(MMisiil(>iu iitid ,lnil(-!i, l>iit. in lisitod Snnuiriii. iind to \ho IkmiIIhmi 
 Ihi-dU^liiiiili ilio wli(il(i rnrlh ; Tor min(> is a miivci'siil kiiiiidom. opt-n (o nil 
 mnnkiml. uillmnl disMnclion o\' nwv m- nmU, oi' bond \ir Uco, ol' liiirl)!iri;iM 
 1)1' («r('i>k, el' .low or (<(Milili>." 
 
 'I'liis I.'ist. inliM-vicw liiid (ak(Mi |>l;n'(^ in JcnisaKMU. luit llt> litul li>ft. ib 
 lii'l'oro llo closed. loiidiiiix thorn out (owiirds BolliMtiy. lli> may liavo 
 walkinl Mirougli tho well known si ro(>ts. voilod froni His otiomios, or llo 
 may luivo apiioinltMl tli(< nnM'ling-plact> for llu-m, wIkmv llo had so ol'ton, in 
 His histi ditys. ri>(.irtHl in Ihoir roiupany. Tlit^ plaoo nyIhm-o llo assiMnblod 
 Ihom is tiot. niii\nl(<ly tvoordod, bnl. wns on tl\o Mount of (^livos. It ■WTia 
 llu> Inst iinio (Inn wcro (o s(M-« llim. Ho hml pct^piirtMl thom. as fivr as 
 (luMr dnlnoss m;vdo possihlo, for His h^jivinu; Ihoni. and luid littiMl thoni tii 
 nroivo tho gift ol" (ho 8piri(, whioh, within a lew days, would illinuinnlo 
 thoir intolloots and lioavls. 
 
 ]\o wishod. houovoc. (o l(-nv(> (Ihmu in snoh m- wny that they should not 
 tiiink Hi> had sin\ply vanishod froni tluMn. and wail for His prosont. V(>-ap- 
 poaraiioo. \\v would show (Iumu. as I'ar as it could ho shown, that ilo 
 rcttifuod fvon\ {\\o vt\v{\\ to His Fa(h<M- ; that C!od took lliui to Hinisolf as 
 Wo liail (akoti I'llijah. Thoy would ho ahlo to toll ni<Mi. wIumx they asked 
 winu-(> Wo now was. that thoy had soimi Tfiiu h\ivo tho world, and |iass 
 through th(^ skills to tht^ (Mor-nal kingxhnns.in His human body, to sit down 
 at tho right hai\d of (unl. The tiiought — Hk liyks; Hk is with tuk 
 Fatmkh ! was. honooforth. to ho tho stay and joy of His t'ollowors in all 
 ages. 
 
 Wo kt\ow n(i( with what last ]iarting words Ho lot thoiu soo Ho was 
 now linally to loavo thom. All that is told us is. that lie gave thoiu His 
 blessing, with nplil'tod h.ands. Stop by stop, Ho had raised their cou- 
 coptivins nearer tho \n>spoakahlo grandeur of His true nature and ■vxork. 
 At tirst tho Toaoher. Ib^ had. at'tiM- a time, by gradual disclosures, rovoalod 
 llimsolf as tho Son of luid. veiled in tho form of man; and now, since 
 His orueitlxion and resurrect ioti. He had taught tliem to see in Him the 
 Messiah, exalted to immortal and Divine majesty, as tho conqueror of 
 death and the Tiorvi of all. 
 
 Tho transoondont iniraole which closed His earthly conimunion-with His 
 chosen ones is most fully i\arrated by St. Luke : — 
 
 " When Ho had sjiokou these things, while they were looking at Him. Ho 
 was trtken up into heaven, and a cloud received Hinx out of their sight '* — 
 that cloud which symbolirod tho prosouoe of God. "And as they were 
 g!V7,ing oartiestly iiito the heavens, as He absconded, behold two men srood 
 by thom. in white apparel, and said to them. * Yo n\en of Galilee, why 
 stsmd y« gazuig into tho heavens? This same Jesus, who is oven now 
 Uvken ium\ you into he.aven. will come, in tho s.amo waj- as ye have seen 
 Him go." *' 
 
 •• Karl h. thou grain of sand on the shore of the Universe of Gixi ; thou 
 nothlohem anvongst the princely cities of the hoavous ; thou .art, and re-
 
 THE KKSUUKKCTION ANI^ THJi I'OJlTY DAYS. 
 
 7:}:i 
 
 rnaincHt, the Lovod One arnongKfc ten thou«an'l hijri« and worhla, the (^hf/ii«;n 
 ot God ! Thoo will ife a^ain vinit, and then thou wilt prepare a throne 
 for irirn, aH thou gavc-nt IJini a rnanger cra'JIe; in Hin ra^liant glory wilt 
 thou rojoifxj, an thou didnt onf;e drink ilin \)\<)<><\ arid Hin U-unt, and rn'.nri, 
 IL'm death I On thee huB the Lord a great work to complete I " 
 
 -<^ 
 
 
 r^ 
 
 ^?c^ 
 
 /f ^ 
 
 FJXfS, 
 
 QatkT ft Tuit>«r, Tl>e DcIwckkI friutUg Wurls, rn«Be, mvJ U>ij/«r.
 
 Works by CUNNINGHAM GEIKIE, D.D. 
 
 HOURS WITH THE BIBLE; 
 
 Or, The Scriptnres in the Light of Modern Discovery and Knowledg-3. 
 
 Vol. I. — From the Creation to Moses. 14th Thousand, 
 
 „ II. — From Moses to the Jcdges. llth „ 
 
 „ III. — From Samsok to Solomon. llth „ 
 ,, rv. — From Kehoboam to Hezekiah. 
 
 ^Vith the Contemporary Prophets. nth „ 
 „ V. — From Manasseh to Zedekiah. 
 
 With the Contemporary Prophets. Oth „ 
 „ VI. — From the Exile to Malacdi. 
 
 With the Contemporary Prophets. 8th „ 
 
 Each Volume complete and distinct in itself. Handsomely bound in cloth 
 price 6s. per Volume, with many Illustration«. 
 
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 The ARCHBISHOP OF YORK says — 
 
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 "I have found in these volumes a very large amount of valuable matter, and that 
 not seldom new." 
 
 The BISHOP OF GLOUCESTER AND BRISTOL says,— 
 
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 London: JAMES NISBET & CO. 
 
 1
 
 Works by CUNNINGHAM GEIKIE, D.D. 
 
 Rev. C. H. SPURGEON says,— 
 
 " I am charmed with the freshness of these volumes, and have learned much 
 from them. Dr. Geikie is one of the best religious writers of the age." 
 
 Professor CARL F. KEIL (Joint- Author of Keil and Delitzscii's 
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 " This book renders a service to Bible readers which cannot fail to gain for it 
 the blessing of God." 
 
 SOME PRESS NOTICES. 
 The CHURCHMAN says,— 
 
 "A work beyond criticism. It gives the concentrated results of many lines of 
 investigation, and is in itself a whole library." 
 
 The CHURCH REVIEW says,— 
 
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 Bible." 
 
 The CHURCH TIMES says,— 
 
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 illustrations are more than beautiful pictures ; they are handmaids to the text." 
 
 The HEBREW says,— 
 
 " One of the very best possible manuals to aid the Bible student in comjire- 
 hending the Scripture text." 
 
 The N. Y. TIMES says,— 
 
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 which he can understand." 
 
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 " An invaluable addition to every theological library. 
 
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 " Invaluable to the Biblical student, and to all intelligent readers of the Bible." 
 
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 2
 
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 The English Reformation. 
 
 NEW EDITION. 8s. 6(L 
 
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 The RECORD says,— 
 
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 NEW EDITION. Price 2s, 6tL \^ 
 
 THE PRECIOUS PROMISES. 
 
 The BISHOP OF MANCHESTER says,— 
 
 " Has given great comfort to my aged mother." 
 
 The BRITISH QUARTERLY says — 
 
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 " Evangelical, practical, comforting, strengtheniug.''^^,^tfS***j 4 j^*"^-.^^ 
 
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 OLD TESTAMENT CHARACTERS. 
 
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 London: JAMES NISBET & CO. 
 
 4 
 
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